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THE 






GREAT SOUTH: 



A RECORD OF JOURNEYS 



LOUISIANA, TEXAS, THE INDIAN TERRITORY, MISSOURI, ARKANSAS, 

MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, GEORGIA, FLORIDA, SOUTH . CAROLINA, 

NORTH CAROLINA, KENTUCKY, TENNESSEE, VIRGINIA, 

WEST VIRGINIA, AND MARYLAND. 



BY 

EDWARD KING. 

M 

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED FROM ORIGINAL SKETCHES 
BY J WELLS CHAMPNEY. 






AMERICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY, 
HARTFORD, CONN. 

1875- 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

SCRIBNER & CO. 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 






PREFACE. 

THIS book is the record of an extensive tour of observation 
through the States of the South and South-west during 
the whole of 1873, and the Spring and Summer of 1874. 

The journey was undertaken at the instance of the publishers 
of Scribners Monthly, who desired to present to the public, 
through the medium of their popular periodical, an account of 
the material resources, and the present social and political 
condition, of the people in the Southern States. The author 
and the artists associated with him in the preparation of the 
work, traveled more than twenty-five thousand miles; visited 
nearly every city and town of importance in the South ; talked 
with men of all classes, parties and colors ; carefully investi- 
gated manufacturing enterprises and sites; studied the course 
of politics in each State since the advent of reconstruction ; 
explored rivers, and penetrated into mountain regions hereto- 
fore rarely visited by Northern men. They were everywhere 
kindly and generously received by the Southern people; and 
they have endeavored, by pen and pencil, to give the reading 
public a truthful picture of life in a section which has, since the 
close of a devastating war, been overwhelmed by a variety 
of misfortunes, but upon which the dawn of a better day is 
breaking. 

The fifteen ex-slave States cover an area of more than 
880,000 square miles, and are inhabited by fourteen millions 
of people. The aim of the author has been to tell the truth 



as exactly and completely as possible in the time and space 
allotted him, concerning the characteristics of this region and 
its inhabitants. 

The popular favor accorded in this country and Great 
Britain to the fifteen illustrated articles descriptive of the South 
which have appeared in Scribner's Monthly, has led to the 
preparation of the present volume. Much of the material 
which has appeared in Scribner will be found in its pages ; the 
whole has, however, been re-written, re-arranged, and, with 
numerous additions, is now simultaneously offered to the English- 
speaking public on both sides of the Atlantic. 

To the talent and skill of Mr. J. Wells Champney, the 
artist who accompanied the author during the greater part of 
the journey, the public is indebted for more than four hundred 
of the superb sketches of Southern life, character, and scenery 
which illustrate this volume. The other artists who have con- 
tributed have done their work faithfully and well. 

New York, November, 1874. 



DEDICATION 



TO MR. ROSWELL- SMITH, 

Scribner &* Co., 654 Broadway, New York. 

My Dear Sir* : — You have been from first to last so inseparably 
as well as pleasantly connected with "The Great South" enterprise, 
that I cannot forbear taking this occasion to thank you, not only for 
originally suggesting the idea of a journey of observation through 
the Southern States, but also for having generously submitted to the 
enlargement of the first plan's scope, until the underiaking demanded 
a really immense outlay. 

I am sure that thousands of people will unite with me in testi- 
fying to you, and the gentlemen associated with you, their thanks 
for the lavish expenditure which has procured the beautiful series of 
engravings illustrating this volume. What I have been able only 
to hint at, the artists have interpreted with a fidelity to life and 
nature in the highest degree admirable. 

I herewith present you the result of the joint labor of author and 
artists, "The Great South" volume. Permit me, sir, to dedicate it 
to you, and by means of this humble tribute to express my admiration 
for the energy and unsparing zeal with which you have carried to 
completion the largest enterprise of its kind ever undertaken by a 
monthly magazine. 

Sincerely Yours, 

EDWARD KING. 
November i, 1874. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

Preface i 

Dedication 3 

I Louisiana, Past and Present 17 

II .The French Quarter of New Orleans — The Revolution and its Effects. . . 28 

III The Carnival — The French Markets 38 

IV The Cotton Trade — The New Orleans Levees 50 

V The Canals and the Lake — The American Quarter. . .". 59 

VI On the Mississippi River — The Levee System — Railroads — The Fort St. 

Philip Canal 67 

VII The Industries of Louisiana — A Sugar Plantation — The Teche Country... 78 

VIII The Political Situation in Louisiana .89 

IX "Ho! for Texas" — Galveston 99 

X A Visit to Houston no 

XI ... .Pictures from Prison and Field 117 

XII Austin, the Texan Capital — Politics — Schools 127 

XIII The Truth About Texas — The Journey by Stage to San Antonio 137 

XIV Among the Old Spanish Missions 147 

XV The Pearl of the South-west 157 

XVI The Plains — The Cattle Trade 167 

XVII Denison — Texan Characteristics 175 

XVIII The New Route to the Gulf ■ 186 

XIX The " Indian Territory " 197 

XX Railroad Pioneering — Indian Types and Character 204 

XXI Missouri — St. Louis, Past and Present 215 

XXII St. Louis Germans and Americans — Speculative Philosophy— Education. . . 222 

XXIII Commerce of St. Louis — The New Bridge over the Mississippi. . .' 230 

XXIV The Mineral Wealth of Missouri 237 

XXV Trade in St. Louis— The Press — Kansas City— Along the Mississippi— The 

Capital 246 

XXVI Down the Mississippi from St. Louis 257 

XXVII Memphis, the Chief City of Tennessee — Its Trade and Character 264 

XXVIII ...The "Supply" System in the Cotton Country, and its Results — Negro 
Labor— Present Plans of Working Cotton Plantations— The Black 
Man in the Mississippi Valley 270 



VI 

PAGE. 

XXIX Arkansas — Its Resources — Its People — Its Politics — Taxation — The Hot 

Springs 278 

xxx vlcksburg and natchez, mississippi — society and politics — a louisiana 

Parish Jury 287 

XXXI Life on Cotton Plantations 297 

XXXII . . . .Mississippi — Its Towns — Finances — Schools — Plantation Difficulties 311 

XXXIII . . . Mobile, the Chief City of Alabama 319 

XXXIV The Resources of Alabama — Visits to Montgomery and Selma 328 

XXXV Northern Alabama — The Tennessee Valley — Traits of Character — Educa- 
tion 339 

XXXVI The Sand-Hill Region — Aiken — Augusta 344 

XXXVII. . .Atlanta — Georgia Politics — The Failure of Reconstruction 350 

XXXVIII .. Savannah, the- Forest City — The Railway System of Georgia — Material 

Progress of the State 358 

XXXIX Georgian Agriculture — " Crackers" — Columbus — Macon — Society — Athens 

—The Coast 371 

XL The Journey to Florida — The Peninsula's History — Jacksonville 377 

XLI Up the St. John's River — Tocoi — St. Augustine 383 

XLII St. Augustine, Florida — Fort Marion 390 

XLIII The Climate of Florida — A Journey to Palatka 398 

XLIV Orange Culture in Florida — Fertility of the Peninsula .402 

XLV Up the Oclawaha to Silver Spring 408 

XLVI The Upper St. John's — Indian River — Key West — Politics — The New Con- 
stitution 416 

XLVII South Carolina — Port Royal— The Sea Islands — The Revolution 422 

XLVIII. . . .On a Rice Plantation in South Carolina 429 

XLIX Charleston, South Carolina 438 

L The Venice of America — Charleston's Politics — A Lovely Lowland City — 

Immigration 444 

LI The Spoliation of South Carolina 454 

LII The Negroes in Absolute Power 460 

LIII The Lowlands of North Carolina. 466 

LIV Among the Southern Mountains— Journey from Eastern Tennessee to West- 
ern North Carolina 474 

LV Across the " Smoky " to Waynesville — The Master Chain of the Alleghanies.48o 

LVI The " Sugar Fork " and Dry Falls — Whiteside Mountain 490 

LVII Asheville — The French Broad Valley — The Ascent of Mount Mitchell. .503 

LVIII The South Carolina Mountains — Cascades and Peaks of Northern Georgia .515 

LIX Chattanooga, the Gateway of the South 527 

LX Lookout Mountain — The Battles around Chattanooga — Knoxville — East- 
ern Tennessee 53^ 



Vll 

PAGE. 

LXI A Visit to Lynchburg in Virginia * 552 

LXII In South-western Virginia — The Peaks of Otter — The Mineral Springs. . . .561 

LXIII Among the Mountains — From Bristol to Lynchburg 569 

LXIV Petersburg — A Negro Revival Meeting 579 

LXV The Dismal Swamp — Norfolk — The Coast 588 

LXVI The Education of Negroes — The American Missionary Association — The 

Peabody Fund — The Civil Rights Bill 596 

LXVII . . . .The Hampton Normal Institute — General Armstrong's Work — Fisk Univer- 
sity — Berea and Other Colleges 603 

LXVIII Negro Songs and Singers 609 

LXIX A Peep at the Past of Virginia — Jamestown — Williamsburg — Yorktown 621 

LXX Richmond — Its Trade and Character 626 

LXXI The Partition of Virginia — Reconstruction and Politics in West and East 

Virginia 639 

LXXII .... From Richmond to Charlottesville 647 

LXXIII From Charlottesville to Staunton, Virginia — The Shenandoah Valley — 

Lexington — The Graves of General Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson — 

From Goshen to " White Sulphur Springs." 656 

LXXIV. .. .Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs — From the "White Sulphur" to Ka- 
nawha Valley — The Mineral Springs Region 670 

LXXV The Kanawha Valley — Mineral Wealth of Western Virginia 681 

LXXVI . . . .Down the Ohio River — Louisville 693 

LXXVII . . .A Visit to the Mammoth Cave 699 

LXXVIII . . The Trade of Louisville 707 

LXXIX. . . .Frankfort — The Blue Grass Region — Alexander's Farm — Lexington 713 

LXXX .... Politics in Kentucky — Mineral Resources of the State 721 

LXXXI .... Nashville and Middle Tennessee 726 

LXXXII . . . A Glance at Maryland's History — Her Extent and Resources 733 

LXXXIII . . The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 741 

LXXXIV . .The Trade of Baltimore — Its Rapid and Astonishing Growth .-748 

LXXXV . . . Baltimore and its Institutions 757 

LXXXVI .. Southern Characteristics— State Pride — The Influence of Railroads — 

Poor Whites — Their Habits 771 

LXXXVII .The Carrying of Weapons — Moral Character of the Negroes 777 

LXXXVIII. Dialect — Forms of Expression — Diet 784 

LXXXIX . .Immigration — The Need of Capital — Division of the Negro Vote — The 

Southern Ladies 792 

XC Rambles in Virginia — Fredericksburg — Alexandria — Mount Vernon — 

Arlington 795 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



AND MAPS. 



PAGE. 

Scene on the Oclawaha River, Florida — Frontispiece 

General Map of the Southern States 15 

Bienville, the Founder of New Orleans 17 

The Cathedral St. Louis — New Orleans iS 

"A blind beggar hears the rustling of her gown, 
and stretches out his trembling hand for 
alms," 19 

"A black girl looks wonderingly into the holy-water 

font " 19 

The Archbishop's Palace, New Orleans 20 

" Some aged private dwellings, rapidly decaying," 25 
A brace of old Spanish Governors. — From por- 
traits owned by Hon. Charles Gayarre, of New 
Orleans 26 

" And where to-day stands a fine Equestrian Statue 
of the Great General " 27 

" A lazy negro, recumbent in a cart " 29 

"The negro nurses stroll on the sidewalks, chatter- 
ing in quaint French to the little children "..'.. 30 

" The interior garden, with its curious shrine". ... 31 

" The new Ursulinc Convent, New Orleans 32 

" And while they chatter like monkeys, even about 
politics, they gesticulate violently " 35 

'* The old French and Spanish cemeteries present 

long streets of cemented walls" 36 

The St. Louis Hotel, New Orleans 37 

The Carnival — " White and black join in its mas- 
querading " 38 

"The coming of Rex, most puissant King of Car- 
nival" 40 

" The Bceuf-Gras — the fat ox — is led in the proces- 
sion " 41 

"When Rex and his train enter the queer old 
streets, the balconies are crowded with spec- 
tators " 42 

"The joyous, grotesque maskers appear upon the 
ball-room floor " 43 

" Many bright eyes are in vain endeavoring to 
pierce the disguise " • 45 

"The French market at sunrise on Sunday morning" 46 

" Passing under long, hanging rows of bananas 
and pine-apples " 47 

"One sees delicious types in these markets" 48 

" In a long passage, between two of the market 
buildings, sits a silent Louisiana Indian wo- 
man " 49 

" Stout colored women, with cackling hens dang- 
ling from their brawny hands " 49 

" These boats, closely ranged in long rows by the 
levde " 50 



PAGE. 

"Whenever there is a lull in the work, they sink 

down on the cotton bales " 52 

" Not far from the levee there is a police court, 

where they especially delight to lounge " 52 

' ' The cotton thieves " 55 

" There is the old apple and cake woman " 55 

' ' The Sicilian fruit-celler " 56 

" At high water, the juvenile population perches on 
the beams of the wharves, and enjoys a little 

quiet fishing " 57 

" The polite but consequential negro policeman," 57 

The St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans 59 

The New Basin 6b 

The old Spanish Fort 60 

The University of Louisiana, New Orleans 61 

The Theatres of New Orleans 61 

Christ Church, New Orleans 62 

The Canal street Fountain. New Orleans 62 

The Charity Hospital, New Orleans 63 

The old Maison de Sante, New Orleans 63 

The United States Marine Hospital, New Orleans 64 

Trinity Church, New Orleans 64 

St. Paul's Church, New Orleans 64 

First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans 65 

The Catholic Churches of New Orleans — St. Jo- 
seph's, St. Patrick's, Jesuit Church and School 65 

The Custom-House, New Orleans 66 

The United States Branch Mint, New Orleans. . . 66 
" Sometimes the boat stops at a coaling station ". . 68 

"The Wasp " 69 

' ' Some tract of hopelessly irreclaimable, grotesque 
water wilderness." (From a painting by Julio.) 70 
The monument on the Chalmettc battle-field. ... 72 

Light-house, South-west Pass 74 

" Pilot Town," South-west Pass 75 

" A Nickel for Daddy " 77 

' ' A cheery Chinaman " 82 

Sugar-cane Plantation — " The cane is cut down 

at its perfection " 83 

" The beautiful ' City Park,' " New Orleans 87 

Map showing the Distribution of the Colored 
Population of the United States. (From the 

U. S. Census Reports) 88 

Map of the Gulf States and Arkansas 89 

The Supreme Court, New Orleans 93 

The United States Barracks, New Orleans 93 

Mechanics' Institute, New Orleans 95 

Going to Texas 99 

"It is only a few steps from an oleander grove to 
the surf" 102 



X 

PAGE. 

"The mule-carts unloading schooners anchored 

lightly in the shallow waves " 103 

" Galveston has many huge cotton-presses " 104 

The Custom-House, Galveston 105 

" Primitive enough is this Texan jail " 106 

The Catholic Cathedral, Galveston 107 

" Watch the negro fisherman as he throws his line 

horizonward " 108 

" The cotton-train is already a familiar spectacle 

on all the great trunk lines " no 

" There are some notable nooks and bluffs along 

the bayou " 112 

"The Head-quarters of the Masonic Lodges of 

the State " 113 

"The railroad depots are everywhere crowded 
with negroes, immigrants, tourists and specu- 
lators " 113 

The New Market, Houston 114 

" The ragged urchin with his saucy face " 114 

" The negro on his dray, racing good-humoredly 

with his fellows " 115 

" The auctioneer's young man " 116 

Sam Houston 117 

View on the Trinity River 118 

"We frequently passed large gangs of the con- 
victs chopping logs in the forest by the road- 
side " 119 

" Satanta had seated himself on a pile of 

oakum " 121 

" As the train passes, the negroes gather in groups 
to gaze at it until it disappears in the dis- 
tance " 123 

The State Capitol, Austin 127 

The State Insane Asylum, Austin 128 

The Texas Military Institute, Austin 128 

The Governor's Mansion, Austin 129 

The Alamo Monument, Austin 131 

The Land Office of Texas, Austin 133 

" The emigrant wagon is a familiar sight there " . . 135 
Sunning themselves — "A group of Mexicans, 

lounging by a wall " 140 

" We encounter wagons drawn by oxen " 141 

" Here and there we pass a hunter's camp " 143 

" We pass groups of stone houses " 146 

" The vast pile of ruins known as the San Jose 

Mission " 147 

The old Concepcion Mission, near San Antonio, 

Texas 151 

An old window in the San Jose Mission 155 

"An umbrella and candlestick graced the christen- 
ing font " 155 

"The comfortable country-house so long occupied 

by Victor Considerant " 156 

The San Antonio River — "Its blueish current 
flows in a narrow but picturesque channel " . . 157 

The source of the San Antonio River 157 

San Pedro Springs — " The Germans have estab- 
lished their beer gardens " 158 

41 Every few rods there is a waterscape in minia- 
ture " 158 

" The river passes under bridges, by arbors and 

bath-houses " 159 

The Ursuline Convent, San Antonio 159 

St. Mary's Church, San Antonio 160 



PAGE. 

A Mexican Hovel 161 

The Military Plaza, San Antonio 161 

' ' The Mexicans slowly saw and carve the great 

stones " 162 

" The elder women wash clothes by the brookside" 163 

Mexican types in San Antonio 164 

' ' The remnant of the old Fort of the Alamo " 165 

" The horsemen from the plains " 167 

" The candy and fruit merchants lazily wave their 

fly-brushes " 168 

A Mexican beggar 168 

" The citizens gather at San Antonio, and discuss 

measures of vengeance " 170 

A Texan Cattle-Drover 171 

Military Head-quarters, San Antonio 172 

Negro Soldiers of the San Antonio Garrison . . . 173 
Scene in a Gambling House — " Playing Keno," 

Denison, Texas 175 

" Men, drunk and sober, danced to rude music " . 176 

" Red Hall " 178 

The Public Square in Sherman, Texas 180 

" With swine that trotted hither and yon " 181 

Bridge over the Red River— (Missouri, Kansas 

and Texas Railway) 182 

The New Route to the Gulf 186 

" The Pet Conductor " 188 

" Charlie " 188 

Our Special Train 189 

" A stock-train from Sedaliawas receiving a squeal- 
ing and bellowing freight " 190 

" The old Hospital," Fort Scott 191 

Bridge over the Marmiton River, near Fort Scott 192 

A Street in Parsons, Kansas 193 

A Kansas Herdsman 193 

A Kansas Farm-yard 194 

"The Little Grave, with the slain horses lying 

upon it " 195 

' ' The stone house which the graceless Kaw has 

turned into a stable for his pony " 195 

" The warrior galloping across the fields " 196 

Monument erected to the memory of Brevet- 
Major E. A. Ogden, near Fort Riley, Kansas 196 

An Indian Territorial Mansion 197 

A Creek Indian 199 

Bridge across the North Fork of the Canadian 
River, Indian Territory (M. K. and T. Railway) 199 

An Adopted Citizen 200 

An Indian Stock-Drover 201 

" The ball-players are fine specimens of men". . 202 

A Gentleman from the Arkansas Border 203 

Limestone Gap, Indian Territory 204 

" Coming in the twilight to a region where great 
mounds reared their whale-backed heights " . . 205 

A ' ' Terminus ' ' Rough 206 

' ' We came to the bank of the Grand River, on a 
hill beyond which was the Post of Fort Gib- 
son " 206 

A Negro Boy at the Ferry 208 

"We found the ferries obstructed by masses of 

floating ice " 209 

" They wore a prim, Shakerish costume " 210 

A Trader among the Indians 210 

"The Asbury Manual Labor School," in the 

Creek domain 211 



PAGE. 

The Toll-Bridge at Limestone Gap, Indian Ter- 
ritory 213 

' Looking down on the St. Louis of to-day, from 

the high roof of the Insurance temple " 215 

' Where now stands the great stone Cathedral " . . 216 

The old Chouteau Mansion (as it was) 217 

The St. Louis Life Insurance Company's Build- 
ing 218 

' In those days the houses were nearly all built of 

hewn logs " 218 

' The crowd awaiting transportation across the 
stream has always been of the most cosmo- 
politan and motley character " 220 

The Court-House, St. Louis 222 

Thomas H. Benton (for thirty years United 

States Senator from Missouri) 223 

William T. Harris, editor of the St. Louis 

" Journal of Speculative Philosophy " 226 

The High School, St. Louis 228 

Washington University, St. Louis 229 

The new Post-Omce and Custom-House in con- 
struction at St. Louis 230 

The new Bridge over the Mississippi at St. 

Louis 233 

View of the Caisson of the East Abutment of 
the St. Louis Bridge, as it appeared during 

construction 234 

The building of the East Pier of the St. Louis 

Bridge 235 

In the " Cut " at Iron Mountain, Missouri 237 

At the Vulcan Iron Works, Carondelet 238 

The Furnace, Iron Mountain, Missouri 241 

The Summit of Pilot Knob, Iron County, Mis- 
souri 243 

The "Tracks," Pilot Knob, Missouri 244 

Map of Missouri 245 

View in Shaw's Garden, St. Louis 246 

Statue to Thomas H. Benton, in Lafayette Park. 247 

The " Four Courts " Building, St. Louis 248 

The Gratiot Street Prison, St. Louis 248 

First Presbyterian Church, St. Louis 249 

Christ Church, St. Louis 250 

The Missouri Capitol, at Jefferson City 254 

' The Cheery Minstrel " 255 

The Steamer "Great Republic," a Mississippi 

River Boat 257 

' ' Down the steep banks would come kaleidos- 
copic processions of negroes and flour barrels " 258 

The Levee at Cairo, Illinois 259 

An Inundated Town on the Mississippi's bank. . 260 

The Pilot-House of the " Great Republic " 261 

A Crevasse in the Mississippi River's Banks. . . . 262 
View in the City Park at Memphis, Tennessee. . 264 
The Carnival at Memphis, Tennessee — ' ' The 
gorgeous pageants of the mysterious Mem- 
phi " 268 

A Steamboat Torch-Basket 277 

View on the Arkansas River at Little Rock 279 

The Arkansas State Capitol, Little Rock 281 

The Hot Springs, Arkansas. 286 

Vicksburg, Mississippi 287 

The National Cemetery at Vicksburg, Missis- 
sippi 288 

The Gamblers' Graves, Vicksburg, Mississippi. 289 



XI 

PAGE. 

Colonel Vick, of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Planter 289 

Natchez-under-the-Hill, Mississippi 291 

View in Brown's Garden, Natchez, Mississippi. . 292 
Avenue in Brown's Garden, Natchez, Mississippi 293 
A Mississippi River Steamer arriving at Natchez 

in the night 294 

' Sah ? " 296 

A Cotton Wagon-Train 302 

A Cotton-Steamer 304 

Scene on a Cotton Plantation 307 

Baton Rouge, Louisiana 309 

The Red River Raft as it Was 310 

Map showing the Cotton Region of the United 

States. (From the U. S. Census Reports.). . . 312 
Map of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and 

Alabama 313 

The Mississippi State Capitol at Jackson 313 

' At the proper seasons, one sees in the long main 

street of the town, lines of emigrant wagons," 314 
' The negroes migrate to Louisiana and Texas in 

search of paying labor " 318 

On the Bay Road near Mobile, Alabama 319 

' Mobile Bay lay spread out before me " 320 

' A negro woman fished silently in a little pool " . 321 

The Custom-House, Mobile, Alabama 322 

Bank of Mobile and Odd Fellows' Hall, Mobile, 

Alabama 323 

The Marine and City Hospitals, Mobile, Ala. . . . 324 

Trinity Church, Mobile, Alabama. 324 

In the City Park, Mobile — "Ebony nurse-maids 

flirt with their lovers " 325 

In the City Park, Mobile — " Squirrels frolic with 

the children " 326 

Barton Academy, Mobile, Alabama 326 

Christ Church, Mobile, Alabama 327 

The Alabama State Capitol, at Montgomery, 332 
The Market- Place at Montgomery, Alabama. . . . 334 

The Cotton-Plant 343 

A Street Scene in Augusta, Georgia 344 

A Bell-Tower in Augusta, Georgia 347 

A Confederate Soldier's Grave, at Augusta, Ga. 348 

Sunset over Atlanta, Georgia 350 

The State-House, Atlanta, Georgia 353 

An Up-Country Cotton- Press 357 

View on the Savannah River, near Savannah, 

Georgia 358 

General Oglethorpe, the Founder of Savannah 359 
The Pulaski Monument in Savannah, Georgia. 360 

A Spanish Dagger-Tree, Savannah 361 

• Looking down from the bluff," Savannah 362 

' The huge black ships swallowed bale after 

bale " 363 

An old Stairway on the Levee at Savannah 364 

The Custom-House at Savannah 365 

View in Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah 365 

The Independent Presbyterian Church, Savan- 
nah 366 

View in Forsyth Park, Savannah 367 

' Forsyth park contains a massive fountain" 368 

A Savannah Sergeant of Police 369 

General Sherman's Head-quarters, Savannah. . 370 

A pair of Georgia " Crackers " 373 

The Eagle and Phcenix Cotton-Mills, Columbus, 

Georgia 373 



Xll 

PAGE. 

The old Fort on Tybee Island, Georgia 375 

Happiness 376 

Moonlight over Jacksonville, Florida 377 

Jacksonville, on the St. John's River, Florida. . . 381 
Residence of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowc, at 

Mandarin, Florida 383 

Green Cove Springs, on the St. John's River, Fla. 384 

On the Road to St. Augustine, Florida 386 

A Street in St. Augustine, Florida 387 

St. Augustine, Florida — "An ancient gateway " 388 
The Remains of a Citadel at Matanzas Inlet. . . . 391 
View of Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida. . . . 392 
Light-house on Anastasia Island,' near St. Au- 
gustine, Florida 393 

View of the Entrance to Fort Marion, St. Au- 
gustine, • Florida 394 

" The old sergeant in charge " 395 

The Cathedral, St. Augustine, Florida 396 

The Banana — " At Palatka, we first found the 

banana in profusion " 400 

"Just across the river from Palatka lies the beau- 
tiful orange grove owned by Colonel Hart "... 402 
Entrance to Colonel Hart's orange grove, oppo- 
site Palatka 404 

The Guardian Angel 407 

A Peep into a Forest on the Oclawaha 409 

' ' We would brush past the trees and vines " 410 

The "Marion " at Silver Spring 412 

Shooting at Alligators 414 

View on the upper St. John's River, Florida. . . . 416 
Sunrise at Enterprise, St. John's River, Florida. 419 

A Country Cart 421 

View of a Rice-field in South Carolina 429 

Negro Cabins on a Rice Plantation 431 • 

"The women were dressed in gay colors " 432 

" With forty or fifty pounds of rice-stalks on their 

heads " 432 

A Pair of Mule-Boots 434 

A " Trunk-Minder " 434 

Unloading the Rice-Barges 435 

" At the winnowing-machine " 436 

"Aunt Bransom " — A venerable cx-slave on a 

South Carolina Rice Plantation 437 

View from Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor.. 438 

The old Charleston Post-Office 440 

Houses on the Battery, Charleston 441 

A Charleston Mansion 442 

The Spire of St. Philip's Church, Charleston.. 443 

The Orphan House, Charleston 444 

The Battery, Charleston 445 

The Grave of John C. Calhoun, Charleston. . . . 446 
The Ruins of St. Finbar Cathedral, Charleston. 447 
" The highways leading out of the city are all richly 

embowered in loveliest foliage " 449 

Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston 450 

Garden in Mount Pleasant, opposite Charleston 452 

Peeping Through 453 

A Future Politician 459 

The State-House at Columbia, South Carolina.. 460 
Sketches of South Carolina State Officers and 

Legislators under the Moses Administration. . 462 
Iron Palmetto in the State-House Yard at Colum- 
bia 465 

A Wayside Sketch 473 



' The Small Boy " 474 

' The Judge " A7 6 

The Judge shows the Artist's Sketch-Book 479 

' The family sang line by line" 481 

A Mountain Farmer 482 

'We caught a glimpse of the symmetrical Cata- 

louchc mountain " 483 

The Canon of the Catalouche as seen from 

" Bennett's " 4^4 

Mount Pisgah, Western North Carolina 485 

The Carpenter — A Study from Waynesville Life 487 

View on Pigeon River, near Waynesville 488 

The Dry Fall of the Sugar Fork, Blue Ridge, 

North Carolina 49° 

View near Webster, North Carolina 492 

Lower Sugar Fork Fall, Blue Ridge, North Car- 
olina 495 

The Devil's Court-House, Whiteside Mountain. 499 

Jonas sees the Abyss 5 01 

Asheville, North Carolina, from " Beaucatcher 

Knob " 504 

View near Warm Springs, on the French Broad 

River 506 

Lover's Leap, French Broad River, Western 

North Carolina 5°8 

View on the Swannanoa River, near Asheville, 

Western North Carolina 509 

First Peep at Patton's 510 

The "Mountain House," on the way to Mount 

Mitchell's Summit 5 11 

View of Mount Mitchell 512 

The Judge climbing Mitchell's High Peak 513 

Signal-Station and " Mitchell's Grave," Summit 

of the Blsok Mountains 5*4 

The Lookers-on at the Greenville Fair 516 

Table Mountain, South Carolina 518 

' Let us address de Almighty wid pra'r " 520 

Mount Yonah, as seen from Clarksvillc, Geor- 
gia 521 

The "Grand Chasm," Tugaloo River, Northern 

Georgia 5 22 

Toccoa Falls, Northern Georgia 524 

A Mail-Carrier 5 2 ^ 

Mission Ridge, near Chattanooga, Tennessee.. 527 
Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee 529 
The Mineral Region in the vicinity of Chattanooga 531 
Map showing Grades of Illiteracy in the United 

States. (From the U. S. Census Reports.). . . 532 
Map of Middle Atlantic States, southern section, 

and North Carolina 533 

The Rockwood Iron-Furnaces, Eastern Tenn- 



;33 



The "John Ross House," near Chattanooga. 
Residence of one of the old Cherokee Land- 
holders : .' 534 

Catching a " Tarpin " 535 

View from Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga 536 

Umbrella Rock, on Lookout Mountain 537 

Looking from " Lookout Cave " 53^ 

" Rock City," Lookout Mountain 539 

View from Wood's Redoubt, Chattanooga 540 

On the Tennessee River, near Chattanooga 542 

The " Suck," on the Tennessee River 543 

A Negro Cabin on the bank of the Tennessee. . 544 



PAGE. 

Knoxville, Tennessee 54-6 

The East Tennessee University, Knoxville 548 

At the ^itna Coal Mines 550 

' Down in a Coal Mine " 551 

The old Market at Lynchburg 552 

The James River, at Lynchburg, Virginia 553 

A Side Street in Lynchburg, Virginia 555 

Scene in a Lynchburg Tobacco Factory 557 

' Down the steep hills every day come the country 

wagons " 558 

Summoning Buyers to a Tobacco Sale 560 

Evening on the James River — " The soft light 
which gently rested upon the lovely stream ". . 561 

In the Gap of the Peaks of Otter, Virginia 562 

The Summit of the Peak of Otter, Virginia 564 

Blue Ridge Springs, South-western Virginia. . . . 566 

Bristol, South-western Virginia 569 

White Top Mountain, seen from Glade Springs 570 

Making Salt, at Saltville, Virginia 571 

Wayside Types — A Sketch from the Artist's Vir- 
ginia Sketch-Book 573 

Wytheville, Virginia 574 

Max Meadows, Virginia 575 

The Roanoke Valley, Virginia 576 

View near Salem, Virginia 577 

View on the James River below Lynchburg. . . . 578 
Appomattox Court-House — " It lies silently half- 
hidden in its groves and gardens " 579 

' The hackmen who shriek in your ear as you arrive 

at the depot " 581 

' The ' Crater, ' the chasm created by the explosion 
of the mine which the Pennsylvanians sprung 

underneath Lee's fortifications " 582 

' The old cemetery, and ruined, ivy-mantled Bland- 
ford Church " 583 

' Seen from a distance, Petersburg presents the 
appearance of a lovely forest pierced here and 

there by church spires and towers " 585 

A Queer Cavalier 587 

City Point, Virginia 588 

A Peep into the Great Dismal Swamp 589 

A Glimpse of Norfolk, Virginia 591 

Map of the Virginia Peninsula 593 

Hampton Roads 594 

The Ruins of the old Church at Jamestown, Vir- 
ginia 621 

Statue of Lord Botetourt at Williamsburg, Vir- 
ginia ." -.— , 622 

The old Colonial Powder Magazine at Williams- 
burg, Virginia 623 

The old Church of Bruton Parish — Williamsburg, 

Virginia 624 

Cornwallis's Cave, near Yorktown, Virginia .... 624 
View of Richmond, Virginia, from the Manches- 
ter side of the James River 626 

Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia 627 

Capitol Square, with a view of the Washington 

Monument, Richmond, Virginia 628 

St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia 629 

View on the James River, Richmond, Virginia. . 630 
Monument to the Confederate Dead, Richmond, 

Virginia 631 

The Gallego Flouring-Mill, Richmond, Vir- 
ginia 631 



Xlll 

PAGE. 

Scene on a Tobacco Plantation — Burning a Plant 

Patch 633 

Tobacco Culture — Stringing the Piimings 633 

A Tobacco Barn in Virginia 633 

The Old Method cf Getiing Tobacco to Market. 634 
Getting a Tobacco Hogshead Ready for Market. 635 
Scene on a Tobacco Plantation — Finding To- 
bacco Worms 636 

The Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond, Virginia 637 

A Water-melon Wagon 646 

A Marl-bed on the Line of the Chesapeake and 

Ohio Railroad 647 

Earthworks on the Chickahominy, near Rich- 
mond, Virginia 648 

Scene at a Virginia " Corn-Shed " 649 

Gordonsville, Virginia — "The negroes, who 
swarm day and night like bees about the 

trains " 650 

The Tomb of Thomas Jefferson, at Monticello, 

near Charlottesville, Virginia 651 

Monticello — The Old Home of Thomas Jefferson, 
author of the Declaration of American Inde- 
pendence ■ 653 

The University of Virginia, at Charlottesville. . . 653 

A, Water-melon Feast 655 

Piedmont, from the Blue Ridge 656 

View of Staunton, Virginia 657 

Winchester, Virginia 658 

Buffalo Gap and the Iron-Furnace 659 

Elizabeth Iron-Furnace, Virginia 660 

The Alum Spring, Rockbridge Alum Springs, 

Virginia 661 

The Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia 661 

Washington and Lee College, Lexington, Va. 66a 
Portrait of General Thomas J. Jackson, known 
as "Stonewall Jackson." (From an engraving 

owned by M. Knoedler & Co., N. Y.) 663 

General Robert Edward Lee, born January 19, 

1801 ; died October n, 1870 664 

The Great Natural Arch, Clifton Forge, Jack- 
son's River 665 

Beaver Dam Falls 665 

Falling Springs Falls, Virginia 666 

Griffith's Knob, and Cow Pasture River 667 

Clay Cut, Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad..... 668 

"Mac, the Pusher " 663 

Jerry's Run 669 

Scene on the Greenbrier River in Western Vir- 
ginia 670 

The Hotel and Lawn at Greenbrier White Sul- 
phur Springs, West Virginia 671 

The Eastern Portal cf Second Creek Tunnel, 

Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad 672 

A Mountain Ride in a Stage-Coach 673 

Anvil Rock, Greenbrier River 675 

A West Virginia " Countryman " 675 

A Freighters' Camp, West Virginia 676 

"The rude cabin built beneath the shadow of a 

huge rock " 677 

" The rustic mill built of logs " 678 

The Junction of Greenbrier and New Rivers. . . . 678 

Descending the New River Rapids 679 

A hard road for artists to travel 680 

The " Hawk's Nest," from Boulder Point 681 



XIV 

PAGE. 

Great Kanawha Falls 682 

Miller's Ferry, seen from the Hawk's Nest 682 

Richmond Falls, New River 683 

Big Dowdy Falls, near New River 684 

Whitcomb's Bowlder 685 

The Inclined Plane at Cannelton 686 

Fern Spring Branch, a West Virginia Mountain 

Stream 687 

Charleston, the West Virginia Capital 688 

The Hale House, Charleston 688 

Rafts of Saw-Logs on a West Virginia River. . . 689 
The Snow Hill Salt Works, on the Kanawha 

River 690 

Indian Mound, near St. Albans 690 

View of Huntington and the Ohio River 691 

The result of climbing a sapling — An Artist in a 

Fix 692 

The Lev^e at Louisville, Kentucky 693 

A familiar scene in a Louisville Street 695 

A Waiter at the Gait House, Louisville, Kentucky 696 

Scene in the Louisville Exposition 697 

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky — The Boat Ride on 

Echo River 699 

The Entrance to Mammoth Cave (Looking Out) . 700 
Mammoth Cave — In "the Devil's Arm-Chair". . 702 
The Mammoth Cave — "The Fat Man's Misery". 703 
Mammoth Cave — "The Subterranean Album". 704 

A Country Blacksmith Shop 706 

The Court-House, Louisville 707 

The Cathedral, Louisville. 708 

The Post-Office, Louisville 708 

The City Hall, Louisville 709 

George D. Prentice. (From a Painting in the 

Louisville Public Library) 710 

The Colored Normal School, Louisville 710 

Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, from the 

New Albany Heights 711 

Chimney Rock, Kentucky 712 

Frankfort, on the Kentucky River 713 

The Ascent to Frankfort Cemetery, Kentucky. . . 714 
The Monument to Daniel Boone in the Cemetery 

at Frankfort, Kentucky 715 

View on the Kentucky River, near Frankfort .... 719 

Asteroid Kicks Up 717 

A Souvenir of Kentucky 719 

A little Adventure by the Wayside 720 

" Steady " 725 

The Tennessee State Capitol, at Nashville 726 

View from the State Capitol, Nashville, Tennes- 
see 727 

Tomb of Ex-President Polk, Nashville, Tennes- 
see 728 

The Hermitage — General Andrew Jackson's old 

homestead, near Nashville, Tennessee 729 

Young Tennesseans 730 

The old home of Gen. Andrew Jackson, near 
Nashville. 731 



PAGE. 

Tomb of Andrew Jackson, at the " Hermitage," 

near Nashville 732 

View from Federal Hill, Baltimore, Maryland, 

looking across the Basin 733 

The Oldest House in Baltimore 735 

Fort McHenry, Baltimore Harbor 738 

Jones's Falls, Baltimore 740 

Exchange Place, Baltimore, Maryland 741 

The Masonic Temple, Baltimore, Maryland. . . . 742 

The Shot-Tower, Baltimore, Maryland 742 

Scene on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal 743 

The Blind Asylum, Baltimore, Maryland 745 

The Eastern High School, Baltimore, Maryland 746 
View of a Lake in Druid Hill Park, Baltimore. . 747 

Maryland Institute, Baltimore 748 

Woodberry, near Druid Hill Park 749 

The new City Hall, Baltimore, Maryland 750 

Lafayette Square, Baltimore, Maryland 750 

The City Jail, Baltimore, Maryland 752 

The Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Maryland. . . 753 

First Presbyterian Church, Baltimore 754 

A Tunnel through the Alleghanies 756 

Mount Vernon Square, with a view of the Wash- 
ington Monument, Baltimore, Maryland 758 

The Battle Monument, seen from Barnum's Ho- 
tel, Baltimore 759 

The Battle Monument, Baltimore, Maryland . . . 760 

The Cathedral, Baltimore, Maryland 760 

The Wildey Monument, Baltimore, Maryland. 761 
Entrance to Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, Mary- 
land 761 

Scene on the Canal, near Harper's Ferry 762 

The Bridge at Harper's Ferry 763 

View of the Railroad and River, from the 

Mountains at Harper's Ferry 764 

Jefferson's Rock, Harper's Ferry 769 

Cumberland Narrows and Mountains 767 

Cumberland Viaduct, Maryland 768 

Harper's Ferry, Maryland 769 

Old John Cupid, a Williamsburg Herb Doctor. 770 

Southern Types— Come to Market 771 

Southern Types — A Southern Plough Team. . . . 772 
Southern Types — Negro Boys Shelling Peas .... 773 
Southern Types — A "likely Girl" with her 

Baby _. 775 

Southern Types — Catching his Breakfast 776 

Southern Types — Negro Shoeblacks tj"] 

Southern Types — A Little Unpleasantness 779 

Southern Types — " Going to Church" 780 

Southern Types — A Negro Constable 781 

Southern Types — The Wolf and the Lamb in 

Politics 784 

Southern Types— Two Veterans discussing the 

Political Situation 787 

The Potomac and Washington, seen from Ar- 
lington 800 

Homeward Bound 801 



THE GREAT SOUTH. 



LOUISIANA PAST AND PRESENT. 



LOUISIANA to-day is Paradise Lost. 
j In twenty years it may be Par- 
adise Regained. It has unlimited, 
magnificent possibilities. Upon its 
bayou-penetrated soil, on its rich 
uplands and its vast prairies, a 
gigantic struggle is in progress. 
It is the battle of race with race, 
of the picturesque and unjust civil- 
ization of the past with the prosaic 
and leveling civilization of the pres- 
ent. For a century and a-half it 
was coveted by all nations ; sought 
by those great colonizers of Amer- 
ica, — the French, the English, the 
Spaniards. It has been in turn 
the plaything of monarchs and 
the bait of adventurers. Its his- 
tory and tradition are leagued with 
all that was romantic in Europe 
and on the Western continent in 

Bienville, the Founder of New Orleans. the eighteenth Century. From its 

immense limits outsprang the noble sisterhood of South-western States, whose 

inexhaustible domain affords an ample refuge for the poor of all the world. 

A little more than half a century ago the frontier of Louisiana, with the 

Spanish internal provinces, extended nineteen hundred miles. The territory 

2 




LOUISIANA PAST AND PRESENT. 



boasted a sea-coast line of five hundred miles on the Pacific Ocean ; drew a 
boundary line seventeen hundred miles along the edge of the British- American 
dominions ; thence followed the Mississippi by a comparative course for fourteen 
hundred miles; fronted the Mexican Gulf for seven hundred miles, and embraced 
within its limits nearly one million five hundred thousand square miles. Texas 
was a fragment broken from it. California, Kansas, the Indian Territory, Mis- 
souri, and Mississippi, were made from it, and still there was an Empire to 
spare, watered by five of the finest rivers of the world. Indiana, Arkansas, 
Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska were born of it. 

From French Bienville to American Claiborne the territorial administrations 
were dramatic, diplomatic, bathed in the atmosphere of conspiracy. Super- 
stition cast a weird veil of mystery over the great rivers, and Indian legend 
peopled every nook and cranny of the section with fantastic creations of untu- 
tored fancy. The humble roof of the log cabin on the banks of the Mississippi 
covered all the grace and elegance of French society of Louis the Fourteenth's 
time. Jesuit and Cavalier carried European thought to the Indians. 

Frenchman and Spaniard, Canadian and Yankee, intrigued and planned on 
Louisiana soil with an energy and fierceness displayed nowhere else in our 
early history. What wonder, after this cosmopolitan record, that even the frag- 
ment of Louisiana which has retained the name — this remnant embracing but 
a thirtieth of the area of the original province — yet still covering more than 
forty thousand square miles of prairie, alluvial, and sea marsh — what wonder 
that it is so richly varied, so charming, so unique ? 

Six o'clock, on Saturday evening, in the good old city of New Orleans. 
From the tower of the Cathedral St. Louis the tremulous harmony of bells drifts 
lightly on the cool spring breeze, and hovers like a benediction over the antique 
buildings, the blossoms and hedges in the square, and the broad and swiftly- 
flowing river. The bells are calling all in the parish to offer masses for the 
repose of the soul of the Cathedral's founder, Don Andre Almonaster, once 
upon a time "perpetual regidor" of New Orleans. Every Saturday eve, for 

three-quarters of a century, the 
solemn music from the Cathedral 
belfry has brought the good 
Andre to mind ; and the mellow 
notes, as we hear them, seem to 
call up visions of the quaint past. 
Don Andre gave the Cathe- 
dral its dower in 1789, while 
the colony was under the domi- 
nation of Charles the Fourth 
of Spain. The original edifice 
is gone now, and in its stead, 
since 1850, has stood a com- 
posite structure which is a monu- 

The Cathedral St Louis-New Orleans Hient to bad taste. Venerable 




THE OLD CATHEDRAL IN NEW ORLEANS. 



19 




"A blind beggar hears the rustling of her gown, and stretches 
out his trembling hand for alms." 



and imposing was the old Cathedral, with its melange of rustic, Tuscan, and 
Roman Doric styles of architecture; with its towers crowned with low spires, 
and its semicircular arched door, with clustered columns on either side at the 
front ; and many a grand pageant had it seen. 

Under the pavement of the Cathedral 
lies buried Father Antonio de Sedella, 
a Spanish priest, who, in his time, was 
one of the celebrities of New Orleans, 
and the very recollection of whom calls 
up memories of the Inquisition, of 
intrigue and mystery. Father Antonio's 
name is sacred in the Louisiana capital, 
nevertheless; for although an enraged 
Spanish Governor once expelled him 
for presuming to establish the Inquisition 
in the colony, he came back, and flour- 
ished until 1837, under American rule, 
dying at the age of ninety, in the odor 
of sanctity, mourned by the women and 
worshiped by the children. 

Now the sunlight mingles with the 
breeze bewitchingly ; the old square, 
the gray and red buildings with massive walls and encircling balconies, the great 
door of the new Cathedral, all are lighted up. See ! a black- robed woman, with 
downcast eyes, passes silently over the holy threshold ; a blind beggar, with 
a parti-colored handkerchief wound about his weather-beaten head, hears the 
rustling of her gown, and stretches out his 
trembling hand for alms ; a black girl 
looks wonderingly into the holy-water 
font; the market-women hush their chatter 
as they near the portal; a mulatto fruit- 
seller is lounging in the shade of an 
ancient arch, beneath the old Spanish 
Council House. This is not an American 
scene, and one almost persuades himself 
that he is in Europe, although ten min- 
utes of rapid walking will bring him to 
streets and squares as generically American 
as any in Boston, Chicago, or St. Louis. 
The city of New Orleans is fruitful in 
surprises. In a morning's promenade, 
which shall not extend over an hundred 
acres, one may encounter the civilizations 
of Paris, of Madrid, of Messina; may „- ' 

Stumble Upon the Semi-barbaric life Of "A black girl looks wonderingly into the holy-water font." 




20 



NAPOLEON THE GREAT AND LOUISIANA. 



the negro and the native Indian; may see the overworked American in his 
business establishment and in his elegant home; and may find, strangest of all, 
that each and every foreign type moves in a special current of its own, mingling 
little with the American, which is dominant : in it, yet not of it — as the Gulf 
Stream in the ocean. 

But the older colonial landmarks in the city, as throughout the State and 
the Mississippi Valley, are fast disappearing. The imprint of French manners 
and customs will long remain, however ; for it was produced by two periods 
of domination. The hatred of Napoleon the Great for the English was 
the motive which led to the cession of Louisiana to the United States: had he 
not come upon the stage of European politics, the Valley of the Father of 
Waters might have been French to-day ; and both sides of Canal street would 
have reminded the European of Paris and Bordeaux. 

The French Emperor, fearful lest the cannon of the English fleets might 
thunder at the gates of New Orleans when he was at war with England, at the 
beginning of this century, sold the " Earthly Paradise " to the United States. 
" The English," said the man of destiny, " shall not have the Mississippi, which 
they covet." And they did not get it. Seventy years ago the tide of crude, 
hasty American progress rushed in upon the lovely lowlands bordering the river 
and the Gulf; and it is astonishing that even a few landmarks of French and 
Spanish rule are left high above the flood. 

Yonder is the archbishop's palace: 

| enter the street at one side of it, and you 

seem in a foreign land; in the avenue at 

the other you catch a glimpse of the 

rush and hurry of American traffic of 

to-day along the levee ; you see the 

sharp-featured " river-hand, " hear his 

uncouth parlance, and recognize him for 

your countryman; you see huge piles of 

cotton bales; you hear the monotonous 

The Archbishop's Pakce-New Orleans. whistle of the gigantic white steamers 

arriving and departing; and the irrepressible negro slouches sullenly by with his 

hands in his pockets, and his cheeks distended with tobacco. 

You must know much of the past of New Orleans and Louisiana to thor- 
oughly understand their present. New England sprang from the Puritan mould ; 
Louisiana from the French and Spanish civilizations of the eighteenth century. 
The one stands erect, vibrating with life and activity, austere and ambitious, 
upon its rocky shores ; the other lies prone, its rich vitality dormant and passive, 
luxurious and unambitious, on the glorious shores of the tropic Gulf. The 
former was Anglo-Saxon and simple even to Spartan plainness at its outset ; the 
latter was Franco- Spanish, subtle in the graces of the elder societies, self- 
indulgent and romantic at its beginning. And New Orleans was no more and no 
less the opposite of Boston in 1773 than a century later. It was a hardy rose 
which dared to blush, in the New England even of Governor Winthrop's time, 




BIENVILLE AND HIS COLONY. 21 

beiore June had dowered the land with beauty ; it was an o 'er modest Choctaw 
rose in the Louisiana of De Soto's epoch which did not shower its petals on the 
fragrant turf in February. 

In Louisiana summer lingers long after the rude winter of the North has done 
its work of devastation ; the sleeping passion of the climate only wakes now 
and then into the anger of lightning or the terrible tears of the thunder-storm; 
there are no chronic March horrors of deadly wind or transpiercing cold ; the 
sun is kind ; the days are radiant. 

Wandering from the ancient Place d'Armes, now dignified with the appel- 
lation of "Jackson Square," through the older quarters of the city, one may 
readily recall the curious, changeful past of the commonwealth and its cos- 
mopolitan capital ; for there is a visible reminder at many a corner and on 
many a wall. It requires but little effort of imagination to restore the city to our 
view as it was in 1723, five years after Bienville, the second French Governor of 
Louisiana, had undertaken the dubious project of establishing a capital on the 
treacherous Mississippi's bank. 

Discouraged and faint almost unto death, after the terrible sufferings which 
he and his fellow- colonists had undergone at Biloxi, a bleak fort in a wilderness, 
he had dragged his weary limbs to the place on the river where New Orleans 
stands to-day, and there defiantly unfurled the flag of France, and made 
his last stand ! Bienville was a man of vast courage and supreme daring ; 
he had been drifting along the Mississippi, through the stretches of wilderness, 
since 1699; had vanquished Indian and beast of the forest; was skilled in the 
lore of the backwoodsman, as became hardy son of hardier Canadian father. 

When he succeeded the alert and courageous Sauvolle as Governor of the 
colony, which had then become indisputably French, he entered upon a period 
of harrowing and petty vexations. He had to keep faithful and persistent watch 
at the entrance of the river from the Gulf, for, during many years England, 
France, and Spain were at war, and the Spaniards ever kept a jealous eye on 
French progress in America. The colony languished, and was inhabited by 
only a few vagabond Canadians, some dubious characters from France, and the 
Government officers. On the 14th of September, 17 12, Louis the Magnificent 
granted to Anthony Crozat, a merchant prince, the Rothschild of the day, the 
exclusive privilege, for fifteen years, of trading in all the indefinitely bounded 
territory claimed by France as Louisiana. 

Crozat obtained with his charter the additional privilege of sending a ship 
once a year for negroes to Africa, and of owning and working all the mines that 
might be discovered in the colony, provided that one-fourth of their proceeds 
should be reserved for the king. One ship-load of slaves to every two ship-loads 
of independent colonists was the proportion established for emigration to 
Louisiana more than a century and a half ago. Slavery was well begun. 

In 17 1 3 Bienville was displaced to make room for Cadillac, sent from France 
as Governor ; a rude, quarrelsome man, who saw no good in the new colony, 
and hated and feared Bienville. But Cadillac's daughter loved the quondam 
Governor whom her father's arrival had degraded ; and to save her from a wasted 



22 LOUISIANA AND JOHN LAW. 

life, the proud Cadillac offered her in marriage to Bienville. The latter did not 
reciprocate the maid's affection, and Cadillac, burning with rage, and anxious to 
avenge himself for this humiliation, sent Bienville with a small force on a 
dangerous expedition among the hostile Indians. He went, returning success- 
ful and unharmed. Cadillac's temper soon caused his own downfall, and others, 
equally unsuccessful, succeeded him. Crozat's schemes failed, and he relin- 
quished the colony. 

And then ? Louisiana the indefinite and unfortunate fell into the clutches of 
John Law. The regent Duke of Orleans had decided to "foster and preserve 
the colony," and in 17 17 gave it to the "Company of the Indies," a com- 
mercial oligarchy into which Law had blown the breath of life. The Royal 
Bank sprang into existence under Law's enchanted wand ; the charter of the 
Mississippi Company was registered at Paris, and the exclusive privilege of 
trading with Louisiana, during twenty-five years, was granted to that company. 

France was flooded with rumors that Louisiana was the long-sought Eldo- 
rado; dupes were made by millions; princes waited in John Law's ante-rooms 
in Paris. Then came the revulsion, the overturn of Law. Louisiana was no 
longer represented as the new Atlantis, but as the very mouth of the pit ; and 
it was colonized only by thieves, murderers, beggars, and gypsies, gathered up 
by force throughout France and expelled from the kingdom. 

After the bursting of the Law bubble, Bienville was once more appointed 
Governor of Louisiana, and his favorite town was selected as the capital of the 
territory. The seat of government was removed from New Biloxi to New 
Orleans, as the city was called in honor of the title of the regent of France. 

Let us look at the New Orleans of the period between 1723 and 1730. 
Imagine a low-lying swamp, overgrown with a dense ragged forest, cut up into a 
thousand miniature islands by ruts and pools filled with stagnant water. Fancy 
a small cleared space along the superb river channel, a space often inundated, but 
partially reclaimed from the circumambient swamp, and divided into a host of 
small correct squares, each exactly like its neighbor, and so ditched within and 
without as to render wandering after nightfall perilous. 

The ditch which ran along the four sides of every square in the city was filled 
with a composite of black mud and refuse, which, under a burning sun, sent 
forth a deadly odor. Around the city was a palisade and a gigantic moat ; tall 
grasses grew up to the doors of the houses, and the hoarse chant of myriads 
of frogs mingled with the vesper songs of the colonists. Away where the waters 
of the Mississippi and of Lake Pontchartrain had formed a high ridge of land, was 
the " Leper's Bluff; " and among the reeds from the city thitherward always 
lurked a host of criminals. 

The negro, fresh from the African coast, then strode defiantly along the 
low shores by the stream ; he had not learned the crouching, abject gait which 
a century of slavery afterwards gave him. He was punished if he rebelled; 
but he kept his dignity. In the humble dwellings which occupied the squares 
there were noble manners and graces; all the traditions and each finesse of the 
time had not been forgotten in the voyage from France : and airy gentlemen 



NEW ORLEANS FROM 1723 TO 1730. 23 

and stately dames promenaded in this queer, swamp-surrounded, river-endan- 
gered fortress, with Parisian grace and ease. 

There were few churches, and the colonists gathered about great wooden 
crosses in the open air for the ceremonials of their religion There were twice as 
many negroes as white people in the city. Domestic animals were so scarce that 
he who injured or fatally wounded a horse or a cow was punished with death. 
Ursuline nuns and Jesuit fathers glided about the streets upon their sacred 
missions. The principal avenues within the fortified enclosure were named after 
princes of the royal blood — Maine, Conde, Conti, -Toulouse, and Bourbon; 
Chartres street took its name from that of the son of the regent of Orleans, and 
an avenue was named in honor of Governor Bienville. 

Along the river, for many miles beyond the city, marquises and other noble 
representatives of aristocratic French families had established plantations, and 
lived luxurious lives of self-indulgence, without especially contributing to the 
wealth of the colony. Jews were banished from the bounds of Louisiana. Sun- 
days and holidays were strictly observed, and negroes found working on Sunday 
were confiscated. No worship save the Catholic was allowed ; white subjects 
were forbidden to marry or to live in concubinage with slaves, and masters were 
not allowed to force their slaves into any marriage against their will; the children 
of a negro slave-husband and a negro free-wife were all free ; if the mother was 
a slave and the husband was free, the children shared the condition of the 
mother. 

Slaves were forbidden to gather in crowds, by day or night, under any 
pretext, and if found assembled, were punished by the whip, or branded with 
the mark of the flower-de-luce, or executed. The slaves all wore marks or 
badges, and were not permitted to sell produce of any kind without the written 
consent of their masters. The protection and security of slaves in old age was 
well provided for; Christian negroes were permitted burial in consecrated ground. 
The slave who produced a bruise, or the " shedding of blood in the face," on the 
person of his master, or any of the family to which he appertained, by striking 
them, was condemned to death ; and the runaway slave, when caught, after the 
first offence, had his ears cut off, and was branded ; after the second, was ham- 
strung and again branded ; after the third, was condemned to death. Slaves 
who had been set free were still bound to show the profoundest respect to their 
"former masters, their widows and children," under pain of severe penalties. 
Slave husbands and wives were not permitted to be seized and sold separately 
when belonging to the same master; and whenever slaves were appointed 
tutors to their masters' children, they " were held and regarded as being thereby 
set free to all intents and purposes." 

The Choctaws and Chickasaws, neighbors to the colonists, were waging 
destructive war against each other; hurricanes regularly destroyed all the 
engineering works erected by the French Government at the mouths of the 
Mississippi ; and expeditions against the Natchez and the Chickasaws, arrivals 
of ships from France with loads of troops, provisions, and wives for the col- 
onists, the building of levees along the river front near New Orleans, and the 



24 MEMORIALS OF FRENCH DOMINATION. 

occasional deposition from and re-instatement in office of Bienville, were the chief 
events in those crude days of the beginning. 

I like to stand in these old Louisiana by-ways, and contemplate the 
progress of French civilization in them, now that it has been displaced by a 
newer one. I like to remember that New Orleans was named after the regent of 
France ; that the beautiful lake lying between the city and the Gulf was 
christened after the splendid Pontchartrain, him of the lean and hungry look, and 
of the " smile of death," him to whom the heart of Louis the Fourteenth was 
.always open ; and that the other lake, near the city, was named in memory of 
Maurepas, the wily adviser of Louis the Sixteenth and unlucky. 

I like to remember that Louisiana itself owes its pretentious name to the 
devotion of its discoverer to the great monarch whom the joyous La Salle 
could not refrain from calling " the most puissant, most high, most invincible and 
victorious prince." I like to picture to myself Allouez and Father Dablon, 
Marquette and Joliet, La Salle, Iberville, and Bienville, following in the footsteps 
of Garay and Leon, Cordova and Narvaez, De Vaca and Friar Mark ; and finally 
tracing and identifying the current of the wild, mysterious Mississippi, which had 
been but a tradition for ages, until every nook and cranny, from the Falls of St. 
Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico, re-echoed to French words of command and 
prayer, as well as to gayest of French chansons. 

Let us take another picture of New Orleans, from 1792 to 1797, thirty years 
after the King of France had bestowed upon " his cousin of Spain" the splendid 
gift of Louisiana, ceding it, " without any exception or reservation whatever, 
from the pure impulse of his generous heart." That a country should, by a 
simple stroke of the pen, strip herself of possessions extending from the mouth of 
the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence, is almost incomprehensible. 

France had perhaps already learned that her people had not in their breasts 
that eternal hunger for travel, that feverish unrest, which has made the Anglo- 
Saxon the most successful of colonists, and has given half the world to him and 
to his descendants. But the French had nobly done the work of pioneering. 
Sauvolle, grimly defying death at Biloxi ; Bienville, urging the adventurous prow 
of his ship through the reeds at the Mississippi's mouth, are among the most 
heroic figures in the early history of the country. 

New Orleans from 1792 to 1797? Its civilization has changed; it is fitted 
into the iron groove of Spanish domination, and has become bigoted, narrow, 
and hostile to innovation. Along the streets, now lined with low, flat-roofed, 
balconied houses, out of whose walls peep little hints of Moorish architec- 
ture, stalks the lean and haughty Spanish cavalier, with his hand upon his 
sword ; and the quavering voice of the night watchman, equipped with his 
traditional spear and lantern, is heard through the night hours proclaiming that 
all is "serene," although at each corner lurks a fugitive from justice, waiting 
only until the watchman has passed to commit new crime. Six thousand souls 
now inhabit the city , there are hints in the air of a plague, and the Intendant 
has written home to the Council of State that " some affirm that the yellow fever 
is to be feared." 



NEW ORLEANS UNDER SPANISH RULE. 



25 



The priests and friars are half-mad with despair because the mixed popula- 
tion pays so very little attention to its salvation from eternal damnation, and 
because the roystering officers and soldiers of the regiment of Louisiana admit 
that they have not been to mass for three years. The French hover about 
the few taverns and coffee-houses permitted in the city, and mutter rebellion 
against the Spaniard, whom they have always disliked. The Spanish and 
French schools are in perpetual collision ; so are the manners, customs, diets, 
and languages of the respective nations. The Ursuline convent has refused to 
admit Spanish women who desire to become nuns, unless they learn the 
French language ; and the ruling Governor, Baron Carondelet, has such small 
faith in the loyalty of the colonists that he has had the fortifications con- 
structed with a view not only to protecting himself against attacks from without, 
but from within. 

The city has suddenly taken on a wonderful aspect of barrack-yard and camp. 
On the side fronting the Mississippi are two small forts commanding the road and 
the river. On their strong and solid brick-coated parapets, Spanish sentinels 
are languidly pacing ; and cannon look out ominously over the walls. Between 
these two forts, and so arranged as to cross its fires with them, fronting on the 
main street of the town, is a great battery commanding the river. Then there 
are forts at each of the salient angles of the long square forming the city, and a 
third a little beyond them — all armed with eight guns each. From one of these 
tiny forts to another, noisy dragoons are always clattering; officers are parading 
to and fro ; government officials block the way ; and the whole town looks like a 
Spanish garrison gradually growing, by =c<fiii 

some mysterious process of transforma- J; v 

tion, into a French city. 

Yet the Spanish civilization does not 
and can not take a strong hold there. 
Spain does not give to New Orleans 
so many lasting historic souvenirs as 
France. Barracks, petty forts, dragoon 
stables, and many other quaint build- 
ings finally disappear, leaving only the §| 
"Principal," next the Cathedral, its B| 
fellow on the other side of the old 
church, some aged private dwellings, 

rapidly decaying, and a delicate imprint "Some aged private dwellings, rapidly decaying." 

and suggestion of former Spanish rule scattered throughout various quarters 
of the city. But Spanish society still lingers, and in some parts of the old 
town the many-balconied, thick-walled houses for the moment mislead the 
visitor into the belief that he is in Spain until he hears the French language, 
or the curious Creole patois everywhere about him. 

Let us take another look at the past of New Orleans. The Spaniard has 
gone his ways ; Ulloa and O'Reilly, Unzaga, Galvez, and Miro, have held their 
governorships under the Spanish King. Carondelet, Gayoso, Casa-Calvo, and 




26 



EXIT SPANIARD ENTER AMERICAN. 




A brace of old Spanish Governors. — From portraits owned 
by Hon. Charles Gayarre, of New Orleans. 



Salcedo alike have vanished. There have been insurrections on the part of 
the French ; many longings after the old banner ; and at last the government 

of France determines once more to pos- 
sess the grand territory. Spain well 
knows that it is useless to oppose this 
decision ; is not sorry, withal, to be rid 
of a colony so difficult to govern, and 
so near to the quarrelsome Americans, 
who have many times threatened to 
take New Orleans by force if any far- 
ther commercial regulations are made 
by Spaniards at the Mississippi's outlet. 
Napoleon the Great has three things 
to gain by the possession of the Ter- 
ritory : the command of the Gulf; the 
supply of the islands owned by France ; and a place of settlement for sur- 
plus population. So that, at St. Ildefonso, on the morning of October first, 
1800, a treaty of cession is signed by Spain, its third article reading as fol- 
lows: "His Catholic Majesty promises and engages, on his part, to retrocede 
to the French Republic, six months after the full and entire execution of the 
conditions and stipulations herein relative to His Royal Highness the Duke 
of Parma — the colony or province of Louisiana, with the same extent that it now 
has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it ; and such as 
it should be after the treaties subsequently entered into between Spain and other 
states." 

This treaty is kept secret while the French fit out an expedition to sail and 
take sudden possession of the reacquired Territory ; but the United States has 
sharp ears ; and Minister Livingston besets the cabinet of the First Consul 
at Paris ; fights a good battle of diplomacy ; is dignified as well as aggressive ; 
wins his cause; and Napoleon tells his counselors, on Easter Sunday, 1803, his 
resolve in the following words : " I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have 
been desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it 
in 1 763 ; a few lines of a treaty have restored it to me, and I have scarcely 
recovered it when I must expect to lose it. But if it escapes from me, it shall 
one day cost dearer to those who oblige me to strip myself of it than to those to 
whom I wish to deliver it." And it is forthwith ceded to the United States, in 
1803, on the "tenth day of Floreal, in the eleventh year of the French republic," 
in consideration of the payment by our government of sixty millions of francs. 

Half a generation brings the conflicting national elements into something like 
harmony, and makes Louisiana a territory containing fifty thousand souls. The 
first steamboat ploughs through the waters of the Mississippi, but more stirring 
events also take place. In 18 12 Congress declares that war exists between 
Great Britain and the United States, and early in 181 5 General Andrew Jackson 
wins a decisive victory over the English arms, on the lowlands near New 
Orleans. Fifteen thousand skilled British soldiers are beaten off and sent home 



GENERAL JACKSON'S TRIUMPH. 



2/ 



in disorder by the raw troops of the river States, by the stalwart Kentuckians, 
the hunters of Tennessee, the rough, hard-handed sons of Illinois, the dashing 
horsemen of Mississippi, and the handsome and athletic Creoles of Louisiana. 
When the victorious Americans return to New Orleans, a grand parade is 
held in the square henceforth to commemorate the name of Jackson, and where 




"And where to-day stands a fine Equestrian Statue of the great General." 

to-day stands a fine equestrian statue of the great general. In front of old 
Almonaster's cathedral the troops are drawn up in order of review. Under a 
triumphal arch, from which glittering lines of bayonets stretch to the river, 
General Jackson, the hero of the Chalmette battle-field, passes, and bows low 
his laurel-crowned head to receive the apostolic benediction of the venerable 
Abbe. 



II. 

THE FRENCH QUARTER OF NEW ORLEANS — THE 
REVOLUTION AND ITS EFFECTS. 

LET me show you some pictures from the New Orleans of to-day. The night- 
mare of civil war has passed away, leaving the memory of visions which 
it is not my province — certainly not my wish — to renew. The Crescent 
City has grown so that Claiborne and Jackson could no longer recognize it. 
It was gaining immensely in wealth and population until the social and 
political revolutions following the war came with their terrible, crushing weight, 
and the work of re-establishing the commerce of the State has gone on under 
conditions most disheartening and depressing; though trial seems to have 
brought out a reserve of energy of which its possessors had never suspected 
themselves capable. 

Step off from Canal street, that avenue of compromises which separates the 
French and the American quarters, some bright February morning, and you 
will at once find yourself in a foreign atmosphere. A walk into the French 
section enchants you ; the characteristics of an American city vanish ; this might 
be Toulouse, or Bordeaux, or Marseilles ! The houses are all of stone or brick, 
stuccoed or painted; the windows of each story descend to the floors, opening, 
like doors, upon airy, pretty balconies, protected by iron railings; quaint 
dormer windows peer from the great roofs ; the street doors are massive, and 
large enough to admit carriages into the stone-paved court-yards, from which 
stairways communicate with the upper apartments. 

Sometimes, through a portal opened by a slender, dark-haired, bright-eyed 
Creole girl in black, you catch a glimpse of a garden, delicious with daintiest 
blossoms, purple and red and white gleaming from vines clambering along a gray 
wall ; rose-bushes, with the grass about them strewn with petals ; bosquets, 
green and symmetrical ; luxuriant hedges, arbors, and refuges, • trimmed by 
skillful hands; banks of verbenas; bewitching profusion of peach and apple 
blossoms ; the dark green of the magnolia ; in a quiet corner, the rich glow of 
the orange in its nest among the thick leaves of its parent tree ; the palmetto, 
the catalpa; — a mass of bloom which laps the senses in slumbrous delight. 
Suddenly the door closes, and your paradise is lost, while Eve remains inside 
the gate ! 

From the balconies hang, idly flapping in the breeze, little painted tin 
placards, announcing " Furnished apartments to rent !" Alas ! in too many of 
the old mansions you are ushered by a gray-faced woman clad in deepest 
black, with little children clinging jealously to her skirts, and you instinctively 



PROMENADES IN THE FRENCH QUARTER. 20, 

note by her manners and her speech that she did not rent rooms before the 
war. You pity her, and think of the multitudes of these gray-faced women ; 
of the numbers of these silent, almost desolate houses. 

Now and then, too, a knock at the porter's lodge will bring to your view a 
bustling Creole dame, fat and fifty, redolent of garlic and new wine, and robust 
in voice as in person. How cheerily she retails her misfortunes, as if they were 
blessings! "An invalid husband — voyez-vous pa! Auguste a Confederate, 
of course — and is yet; but the pauvre garfon is unable to work, and we are very 
poor !" All this merrily, and in high key, while the young negress — the 
housemaid — stands lazily listening to her mistress's French, nervously polishing 
with her huge lips the handle of the broom she holds in her broad, corded 
hands. 

Business here, as in foreign cities, has usurped only half the domain ; the 
shopkeepers live over their shops, and communicate to their commerce somewhat 
of the aroma of home. The dainty salon, where the ladies' hairdresser holds 
sway, has its doorway enlivened by the baby ; the grocer and his wife, the 
milliner and his daughter, are behind the counters in their respective shops. 
Here you pass a little cafe, with the awning drawn down, and, peering in, 
can distinguish half-a-dozen bald, rotund old boys drinking their evening 
absinthe, and playing picquet and vingt-et-un, exactly as in France. 

Here, perhaps, is a touch of Americanism : a 
lazy negro, recumbent in a cart, with his eyes 
languidly closed, and one dirty foot sprawled on the 
sidewalk. No ! even he responds to your question in 
French, which he speaks poorly though fluently. French 
signs abound ; there is a warehouse for wines and 
brandies from the heart of Southern France ; here is a 
funeral notice, printed in deepest black : " The friends 
of Jean Baptiste," etc., "are respectfully invited to be 
present at the funeral, which will take place at pre- 
cisely four O'clock, On the ." The notice is "Alazy negro, recumbent in a cart." 

on black-edged note-paper, nailed to a post. Here pass a group of French 
negroes, the buxom girls dressed with a certain grace, and with gay ly- colored 
handkerchiefs wound about an unpardonable luxuriance of wool. Their cavaliers 
are clothed mainly in antiquated garments rapidly approaching the level of rags ; 
and their patois resounds for half-a-dozen blocks. 

Turning into a side street leading off from Royal, or Chartres, or Bourgogne, 
or Dauphin, or Rampart streets, you come upon an odd little shop, where the 
cobbler sits at his work in the shadow of a grand old Spanish arch; or upon a 
nest of curly-headed negro babies ensconced on a tailor's bench at the window 
of a fine ancient mansion ; or you look into a narrow room, glass-fronted, and 
see a long and well-spread table, surrounded by twenty Frenchmen and French- 
women, all talking at once over their eleven o'clock breakfast. 

Or you may enter aristocratic restaurants, where the immaculate floors 
are only surpassed in cleanliness by the spotless linen of the tables ; where a 




3o 



PICTURES FROM THE STREETS. 



solemn dignity, as befits the refined pleasure of dinner, prevails, and where 
the waiter gives you the names of the dishes in both languages, and bestows on 
you a napkin large enough to serve you as a shroud, if this strange melange of 
French and Southern cookery should give you a fatal indigestion. The French 
families of position usually dine at four, as the theatre begins promptly at seven, 
both on Sundays and week days. There is the play-bill, in French, of course ; 
and there are the typical Creole ladies, stopping for a moment to glance at it as 
they wend their way shopward. For it is the shopping hour ; from eleven to 
two the streets of the old quarter are alive with elegantly, yet soberly attired 
ladies, always in couples, as French etiquette exacts that the unmarried lady shall 
never promenade without her maid or her mother. 

One sees beautiful faces on the Rue Royale (Royal street), and in the 
balconies and lodges of the Opera House ; sometimes, too, in the cool of the 
evening, there are fascinating little groups of the daughters of Creoles on the 
balconies, gayly chatting while the veil of the twilight is torn away, and 
the glory of the Southern moonlight is showered over the quiet streets. 

The Creole ladies are not, as a rule, so highly educated as the gracious 
daughters of the "American quarter;" but they have an indefinable grace, a 
savoir in dress, and a piquant and alluring charm in person and conversation, 
which makes them universal favorites in society. 

One of the chiefest of their attractions is the staccato and queerly- colored 
English, really French in idea and accent, which many of them speak. At 
the Saturday matinees, in the opera or comedy season at the French Theatre, 
you will see hundreds of the ladies of "the quarter;" and rarely can a finer 

grouping of lovely brunettes be found; 
nowhere a more tastefully - dressed and 
elegantly - mannered assembly. 

The quiet which has reigned in the old 
French section since the war ended is, per- 
haps, abnormal ; but it would be difficult to 
find village streets more tranquil than are the 
main avenues of this foreign quarter after 
nine at night. The long, splendid stretches 
of Rampart and Esplanade streets, with their 
rows of trees planted in the centre of the 
driveways, — the whitewashed trunks giving 
a fine effect of green and white, — are peace- 
ful ; the negro nurses stroll on the sidewalks, 
chattering in quaint French to the little 
children of their former masters — now their 
" employers." 

There is no attempt on the part of the 
French or Spanish families to inaugurate 
style and fashion in the city ; quiet home 

" The negro nurses stroll on the sidewalks, chattering • , , i i • „j .~„-„,,:.,,-r /-.f 

in quaint French to the little children.- society, match - making and marrying oi 




SOCIETY AND CHARACTER. 



31 



daughters, games and dinner parties, church, shopping, and calls in simple and 
unaffected manner, content them. 

The majority of the people in the whole quarter seem to have a total disregard 
of the outside world, and when one hears them discussing the distracted condition 
of local politics, one can almost fancy them gossiping on matters entirely foreign 
to them, instead of on those vitally connected with their lives and property. 
They live very much among themselves. French by nature and training, they get 
but a faint reflection of the excitements in these United States. It is also aston- 
ishing to see how little the ordinary American citizen of New Orleans knows of 
his French neighbors; how ill he ap- 
preciates them. It is hard for him to 
talk five minutes about them without 
saying, "Well, we have a non-progres- 
sive element here ; it will not be con- 
verted." Having said which, he will 
perhaps paint in glowing colors the vir- 
tues and excellences of his French 
neighbors, though he cannot forgive 
them for taking so little interest in 
public affairs. 

Here we are again at the Arch- 
bishop's Palace, once the home of the 
Ursuline nuns, who now have, further 
down the river, a splendid new convent 
and school, surrounded by beautiful 
gardens. This ancient edifice was com- 
pleted by the French Government in 
1733, and is the oldest in Louisiana. 
Its Tuscan composite architecture, its 

porter's lodge, and its interior garden " The interior garden, with its curious shrine." 

with its curious shrine, make it well worth preserving, even when the tide of 
progress shall have reached this nook on Conde street. The Ursuline nuns 
occupied this site for nearly a century, and it was abandoned by them only 
because they were tempted, by the great rise in real estate in that vicinity, to 
sell. The new convent is richly endowed, and is one of the best seminaries in 
the South. 

Many of the owners of property in the vicinity of the Archbishop s Palace 
have removed to France, since the war, — doing nothing for the benefit of the 
metropolis which gave them their fortunes. The rent of these solidly-con- 
structed old houses once brought them a sum which, when translated from 
dollars into francs, was colossal, and which the Parisian tradesmen tucked away 
into their strong boxes. Now they get almost nothing ; the houses are mainly 
vacant. With the downfall of slavery, and the advent of reconstruction, came 
such radical changes in Louisiana politics and society that those belonging 
to the ancien regime who could flee, fled ; and a prominent historian and gen- 




32 



THE REVOLUTION — ITS EFFECTS. 








The New Ursuline Convent — New Orleans. 



tleman of most honorable Creole descent told me that, among his immense 
acquaintance, he did not know a single person who would not leave the State 
if means were at hand. 

The grooves in which society in Louisiana and New Orleans had run before 

the late struggle 
were so broken 
that even a resi- 
dence in the State 
was distasteful to 
him and the so- 
ciety he represent- 
ed ; since the late 
war, he said, 500 
years seemed to 
have passed over 
the common- 
wealth. The Italy of Augustus was not more dissimilar to the Italy of to-day 
than is the Louisiana of to-day to the Louisiana before the war. There was no 
longer the spirit to maintain the grand, unbounded hospitality once so charac- 
teristic of the South. Formerly, the guest would have been presented to 
planters who would have entertained him for days, in royal style, and who 
would have sent him forward in their own carriages, commended to the hos- 
pitality of their neighbors. Now these same planters were living upon corn 
and pork. " Most of these people," said the gentleman, " have vanished from 
their homes; and I actually know ladies of culture and refinement, whose incomes 
were gigantic before the war, who are 'washing' for their daily bread. The 
misery, the despair, in hundreds of cases, are beyond belief." 

"Many lovely plantations," said he, "are entirely deserted; the negroes 
will not remain upon them, but flock into the cities, or work on land which they 
have purchased for themselves." He would not believe that the free negro did 
as much work for himself as he formerly did for his master. He considered the 
labor system at the present time terribly onerous for planters. The negroes 
were only profitable as field hands when they worked on shares, the planters 
furnishing them land, tools, horses, mules, and advancing them food. He said 
that he would not himself hire a negro even at small wages; he did not believe 
it would be profitable. The discouragement of the natives of Louisiana, he 
believed, arose in large degree from the difficulty of obtaining capital with which 
to begin anew. He knew instances where only $10,000 or $20,000 were needed 
for the improvement of water power, or of lands which would net hundreds of 
thousands. He had himself written repeatedly, urging people at the North to 
invest, but they would not, and alleged that they should not alter their deter- 
mination so long as the present political condition prevailed. 

He added, with great emphasis, that he did not think the people of the North 
would believe a statement which should give a faithful transcript of the present 
condition of affairs in Louisiana. The natives of the State could hardly 



THE SHADOW OVER LOUISIANA. 33 

realize it themselves ; and it was not to be expected that strangers, of differ- 
ing habits of life and thought, should do it. He did not blame the negro for 
his present incapacity, as he considered the black man an inferior being, 
peculiarly unfitted by ages of special training for what he was now called 
upon to undertake. The negro was, he thought, by nature, kindly, gen- 
erous, courteous, susceptible of civilization only to a certain degree ; devoid 
of moral consciousness, and usually, of course, ignorant. Not one out of a 
hundred, the whole State through, could write his name; and there had been 
fifty-five in one single Legislature who could neither read nor write. There was, 
according to him, scarcely a single man of color in the last Legislature who was 
competent in any large degree. 

The Louisiana white people were in such terror of the negro government that 
they would rather accept any other despotism. A military dictator would be 
far preferable to them ; they would go anywhere to escape the ignominy to 
which they were at present subjected. The crisis was demoralizing every one. 
Nobody worked with a will; every one was in debt There was not a single 
piece of property in the city of New Orleans in which he would at present 
invest, although one could now buy for $5,000 or $10,000 property originally 
worth $50,000. He said it would not pay to purchase, the taxes were so 
enormous. The majority of the great plantations had been deserted on account 
of the excessive taxation. Only those familiar with the real causes of the 
despair could imagine how deep it was. 

Benefit by immigration, he maintained, was impossible under the present 
regime. New-comers mingled in. the distracted politics in such a manner as to 
neglect the development of the country. Thousands of the citizens were fleeing 
to Texas (and I could vouch for the correctness of that assertion). He said 
that the mass of immigrants became easily discouraged and broken down, 
because they began by working harder than the climate would permit. 

In some instances, Germans on coming into the State had been ordered 
by organizations both of white and colored native workmen not to labor so 
much daily, as they were setting a dangerous example ! Still, he believed 
that almost any white man would do as much work as three negroes. He 
hardly thought that in fifty years there would be any negroes in Louisiana. 
The race was rapidly diminishing. Planters who had owned three or four hun- 
dred slaves before the war, had kept a record of their movements, and found 
that more than half of them had died of want and neglect. The negroes did 
not know how to care for themselves. The women now on the same plantations 
where they had been owned as slaves gave birth to only one child where they 
had previously borne three. They would not bear children as of old; the negro 
population was rapidly decreasing. Gardening, he said, had proved an un- 
profitable experiment, because of the thievish propensities of the negro. All 
the potatoes, turnips, and cabbages consumed by the white people of New 
Orleans came from the West 

Such was the testimony of one who, although bv no means unfair or bitterly 
partisan, perhaps allowed his discouragement to color all his views. He frankly 
3 



34 DISCOURAGEMENT AND DESPAIR. 

I 

accepted the results of the war, so far as the abolition of slavery and the 
consequent ruin of his own and thousands of other fortunes were concerned ; he 
has, indeed, borne with all the evils which have arisen out of reconstruction, 
without murmuring until now, when he and thousands of his fellows are pushed 
to the wall. He is the representative of a very large class ; the discouragement 
is no dream. It is written on the faces of the citizens ; you may read and 
realize it there. 

Ah! these faces, these faces; — expressing deeper pain, profounder discontent 
than were caused by the iron fate of the few years of the war ! One sees them 
everywhere ; on the street, at the theatre, in the salon, in the cars ; and pauses 
for a moment, struck with the expression of entire despair — of complete helpless- 
ness, which has possessed their features. Sometimes the owners of the faces are 
one-armed and otherwise crippled ; sometimes they bear no wounds or marks 
ot wounds, and are in the prime and fullness of life ; but the look is there still. 
Now and then it is controlled by a noble will, the pain of which it tells having 
been trampled under the feet of a great energy ; but it is always there. The 
struggle is over, peace has been declared, but a generation has been doomed. 
The past has given to the future the dower of the present ; there seems only a 
dead level of uninspiring struggle for those going out, and but small hope 
for those coming in. That is what the faces say; that is the burden of their 
sadness. 

These are not of the loud- mouthed and bitter opponents of everything tend- 
ing to reconsolidate the Union ; these are not they who will tell you that some 
day the South will be united once more, and will rise in strength and strike a 
blow for freedom ; but they are the payers of the price. The look is on the 
faces of the men who wore the swords of generals who led in disastrous 
measures ; on the faces of women who have lost husbands, children, lovers, 
fortunes, homes, and comfort for evermore. The look is on the faces of the 
strong fighters, thinkers, and controllers of the Southern mind and heart ; and 
here in Louisiana it will not brighten, because the wearers know that the 
great evils of disorganized labor, impoverished society, scattered families, race 
legislation, retributive tyranny and terrorism, with the power, like Nemesis of 
old, to wither and blast, leave no hope for this generation. Heaven have 
mercy on them ! Their fate is too utterly inevitable not to command the 
strongest sympathy. 

Of course, in the French quarter, there are multitudes of negroes who speak 
both French and English in the quaintest, most outlandish fashion; eliding whole 
syllables which seem necessary to sense, and breaking into extravagant excla- 
mations on the slightest pretext. The French of the negroes is very much like 
that of young children; spoken far from plainly, but with a pretty grace 
which accords poorly with the exteriors of the speakers. The negro women, 
young and old, wander about the streets bareheaded and barearmed; now tug- 
ging their mistresses' children, now carrying huge baskets on their heads, and 
walking under their heavy burdens with the gravity of queens. Now and 
then one sees a mulatto girl hardly less fair than the brown maid he saw 



NEGRO CUSTOMS AND MANNERS. 



O 



at Sorrento, or in the vine-covered cottage at the little mountain town near 
Rome ; now a giant matron, black as the tempest, and with features as pro- 
nounced in savagery as any of her Congo ancestors. 

But the negroes, taken as a whole, seem somewhat shuffling and disor- 
ganized; and apart from the statuesque old house and body servants, who appear 
to have caught some dignity from their masters, they are by no means inviting. 
They gather in groups at the street corners just at nightfall, and while they 
chatter like monkeys, even about politics, they gesticulate violently. They 
live without much work, for their wants are few ; and two days' labor in a 
week, added to the fat roosters and turkeys that will walk into their clutches, 
keeps them in bed and board. They find ample amusement in the "heat o' the 
sun," the passers-by, and tobacco. There are families of color noticeable for 




"And while they chatter like monkeys, even about politics, they gesticulate violently.' 1 

intelligence and accomplishments , but, as a rule, the negro ot the French 
quarter is thick-headed, light-hearted, improvident, and not too conscientious. 

Perhaps one of the most patent proofs of the poverty now so bitterly felt 
among the hitherto well-to-do families in New Orleans was apparent in the 
suspension of the opera in the winter of 1873. Heretofore the Crescent City has 
rejoiced in brilliant seasons, both the French and Americans uniting in sub- 
scriptions sufficient to bring to them artists of unrivaled talent and culture. 
But opera entailed too heavy an expense, when the people who usually supported 
it were prostrate under the hands of plunderers, and a comedy company from 
the Paris theatres took its place upon the lyric stage. The French Opera House 
is a handsomely arranged building of modern construction, at ttr corner of 
Bourbon and Toulouse streets. The interior is elegantly decorated, and now 
during the season of six months the salle is nightly visited by hundreds of the 
subscribers, who take tickets for the whole season, and by the city's floating 
population. Between each act of the pieces all the men in the theatre rise, stalk 



& 



THE OPERA IN NEW ORLEANS. 



out, puff cigarettes, and sip iced raspberry- water and absinthe in the cafes, 
returning in a long procession just as the curtain rises again; while the ladies 
receive the visits of friends in the loges or in the private boxes, which they 
often occupy four evenings in the week. The New Orleans public, both French 
and American, possesses excellent theatrical taste, and is severely critical, especi- 
ally in opera. It is difficult to find a Creole family of any pretensions in which 
music is not cultivated in large degree. 

People in the French quarter very generally speak both prevailing languages, 
while the majority of the American residents do not affect the French. The 
Gallic children all speak English, and in the street-plays of the boys, as in their 
conversation, French and English idioms are strangely mingled. American 
boys call birds, fishes and animals by corrupted French names, handed down 
through seventy years of perversion, and a dreadful threat on the part of Young 
America is, that he will "mallerroo" you, which seems to hint that our old French 
friend malheureiix, "unhappy," has, with other words, undergone corruption. 
When an American boy wishes his comrade to make his kite fly higher, he says, 
poussez ! just as the French boy does, and so on ad infinitum. 

Any stranger who remains in the French quarter over Sunday will be amazed 
at the great number of funeral processions. It would seem, indeed, as if death 
came uniformly near the end of the week in order that people might be 
laid away on the Sabbath. The cemeteries, old and new, rich and poor, 
are scattered throughout the city, and most of them present an extremely 
beautiful appearance — the white tombs nestling among the dark-green foliage. 
It would be difficult to dig a grave of the ordinary depth in the " Louisiana 

lowlands" without coming to water; 
and, consequently, burials in sealed 
tombs above ground are universal. 
The old French and Spanish cemete- 
ries present long streets of cemented 
walls, with apertures into which once 
were thrust the noble and good of the 
land, as if they were put into ovens 
to be baked ; and one may still read 
queer inscriptions, dated away back in 
the middle of the eighteenth century. 
Great numbers of the monuments both 
in the old and new cemeteries are very 
imposing; and, one sees every day, as 
in all Catholic communities, long pro- 
cessions of mourning relatives carrying 
flowers to place on the spot where 
their loved and lost are entombed ; 
or catches a glimpse of some black- 
robed figure sitting motionless before 
a tomb. The St. Louis Cemetery is 




"The old French and Spanish cemeteries present long 
streets of cemented walls." 



THE ST. LOUIS HOTEL. 



37 



fine, and many dead are even better housed in it than they were in life. The 
St. Patrick, Cypress Grove, Firemen's, Odd Fellows, and Jewish cemeteries, 
in the American quarter, are filled with richly-wrought tombs, and trav- 
ersed by fine, tree-planted avenues. 

The St. Louis Hotel is one of the most imposing monuments of the French 
quarter, as well as one of the finest hotels in the United States. It was 
originally built to combine a city exchange, hotel, bank, ball-rooms, and private 
stores. The rotunda, metamorphosed into a dining-hall, is one of the most beau- 
tiful in this country, and the great inner 
circle of the dome is richly frescoed with 
allegorical scenes and busts of eminent 
Americans, from the pencils of Canova 
and Pinoli. The immense ball-room 
is also superbly decorated. The St. 
Louis Hotel was very nearly destroyed 
by fire in 1840, but in less than two 
years was restored to its original splen- 
dor. On the eastern and western sides 
of Jackson Square are the Pontalba 
buildings, large and not especially 
handsome brick structures, erected by 
the Countess Pontalba, many years 
ago. Chartres street, and all the — -~ - 

avenues Contributing tO it, are tllOr- The St. Louis Hotel — New Orleans. 

oughly French in character ; cafes, wholesale stores, pharmacies, shops for 
articles of luxury, all bear evidence of Gallic taste. 

Every street in the old city has its legend, either humorous or tragical ; and 
each building which confesses to an hundred years has memories of foreign 
domination hovering about it. The elder families speak with bated breath and 
touching pride of their " ancestor who came with Bienville," or with such 
and such Spanish Governors; and many a name among those of the Creoles 
has descended untarnished to its present possessors through centuries of valor 
and adventurous achievement. 




III. 



THE CARNIVAL — THE FRENCH MARKETS. 

C CARNIVAL keeps its hold upon the people along the Gulf shore, despite 
A the troubles, vexations, and sacrifices to which they have been forced 
to submit since the social revolution began. White and black join in its 




The Carnival — "White and Black join in its masquerading." 

masquerading, and the Crescent City rivals Naples in the beauty and richness 
of its displays. Galveston has caught the infection, and every year the King of 
the Carnival adds a city to the domain loyal to him. The saturnalia practiced 



ORIGIN OF THE CARNIVAL. 39 

before the entry into Lent are the least bit practical, because Americans find it 
impossible to lay aside business utterly even on Mardi-Gras. The device of 
the advertiser pokes its ugly face into the very heart of the masquerade, and 
brings base reality, whose hideous features, outlined under his domino, put a 
host of sweet illusions to flight. 

The Carnival in New Orleans was organized in 1827, when a number of 
young Creole gentlemen, who had recently returned from Paris, formed a street- 
procession of maskers. It did not create a profound sensation — was considered 
the work of mad wags; and the festival languished until 1837, when there was a 
fine parade, which was succeeded by another still finer in 1839. From two o'clock 
in the afternoon until sunset of Shrove Tuesday, drum and fife, valve and 
trumpet, rang in the streets, and hundreds of maskers cut furious antics, and 
made day hideous. Thereafter, from 1840 to 1852, Mardi-Gras festival had 
varying popularity — such of the townspeople as had the money to spend now 
and then organizing a very fantastic and richly-dressed rout of mummers. At 
the old Orleans Theatre, balls of princely splendor were given ; Europeans even 
came to join in the New World's Carnival, and Avrote home enthusiastic accounts 
of it. In 1857 the " Mistick Krewe of Comus," a private organization of New 
Orleans gentlemen, made their debut, and gave to the festivities a lustre which, 
thanks to their continued efforts, has never since quitted it. In 1857 the 
"Krewe" appeared in the guise of supernatural and mythological characters, 
and flooded the town with gods and demons, winding up the occasion with 
a grand ball at the Gaiety Theatre ; previous to which they appeared in 
tableaux representing the "Tartarus" of the ancients, and Milton's "Paradise 
Lost." In 1858 this brilliant coterie of maskers renewed the enchantments of 
Mardi-Gras, by exhibiting the gods and goddesses of high Olympus and of the 
fretful sea, and again gave a series of brilliant tableaux. In 1859 they pictured 
the revels of the four great English holidays, May Day, Midsummer Eve, 
Christmas and Twelfth Night. In i860 they illustrated American history in a 
series of superb groups of living statues mounted on moving pedestals. In 186 1 
they delighted the public with "Scenes from Life" — Childhood, Youth, Man- 
hood and Old Age; and the ball at the Varieties Theatre was preceded by a 
series of grandiose tableaux which exceeded all former efforts. Then came the 
war; maskers threw aside their masks; but, in 1866, after the agony of the long 
struggle, Comus once more assembled his forces, and the transformations which 
Milton attributed to the sly spirit himself were the subject of the display. The 
wondering gazers were shown how Comus, 

" Deep-skilled in all his mother's witcheries, 
By sly enticement gives his baneful cup, 
With many murmurs mixed, whose pleasing poison 
The visage quite transforms of him that drinks, 
And the inglorious likeness of a beast 
Fixes instead." 

In 1867 Comus became Epicurean, and blossomed into a walking bill of 
fare, the maskers representing everything in the various courses and entrees of a 



40 



THE KREWE OF COMUS. 



gourmand's dinner, from oysters and sherry to the omelette bridee, the Kirsch and 
Curacoa. A long and stately array of bottles, dishes of meats and vegetables, 
and desserts, moved through the streets, awakening saturnalian laughter 
wherever it passed. In 1868 the Krewe presented a procession and tableaux 
from "Lalla Rookh;" in 1869, the "Five Senses;" and in 1870, the "History 
of Louisaina;" when old Father Mississippi himself, De Soto and his fellow-dis- 
coverers, the soldiers, adventurers, cavaliers, Jesuits, French, Spanish, and 
American Governors, were all paraded before the amazed populace. In 1871, 
King Comus and his train presented picturesque groupings from Spenser's 
"Faery Queene ;" in 1872, from Flomer's "Tale of Troy;" and in 1873 detailed 
the "Darwinian Development of the Species" from earliest beginnings to the 
gorilla, and thence to man. The Krewe of Comus has always paid the expenses 
of these displays itself, and has issued invitations only to as many people as 
could be accommodated within the walls of the theatre to witness the tableaux. 
It is composed of one hundred members, who are severally sworn to conceal 
their identity from all outsiders, and who have thus far succeeded admirably in 
accomplishing this object. The designs for their masks are made in New 
Orleans, and the costumes are manufactured from them in Paris yearly. In 
1870 appeared the " Twelfth-Night Revelers"— who yearly celebrate the beauti- 
ful anniversary of the visit of the wise men of the East to the manger of the 
Infant Saviour. In 1870 the pageants of this organization were inaugurated by 




'The coming of Rex, most puissant King of Carnival." [Page 41. J 



THE COMING OF THE KING. 



41 



" The Lord of Misrule and his Knights;" in 187 1, "Mother Goose's Tea Party" 
was given; in 1872, a group of creations of artists and poets and visionaries, 
from lean Don Quixote to fat Falstaff, followed; and in 1873 the birds were 
represented, in a host of fantastic and varied tableaux. 

Another feature has been added to the festivities, one which promises in time 
to be most attractive of all. It is the coming of Rex, most puissant King of 




'The Boeuf-Gras — the fat ox — is led in the procession." [Page 42. 



Carnival. This amiable dignitary, depicted as a venerable man, with snow-white 
hair and beard, but still robust and warrior-like, made his first appearance on the 
Mississippi shores in 1872, and issued his proclamations through newspapers and 
upon placards, commanding all civil and military authorities to show subservience 
to him during his stay in " our good city of New Orleans." Therefore, yearly, 
when the date of the recurrence of Mardi-Gras has been fixed, the mystic King 
issues his proclamation, and is announced as having arrived at New York, or 
whatever other port seemeth good. At once thereafter, and daily, the papers 
teem with reports of his progress through the country, interspersed with anec- 
dotes of his heroic career, which is supposed to have lasted for many centuries. 
The court report is usually conceived somewhat in the style of the following 
paragraph, supposed to be an anecdote told at the "palace" by an "old gray- 
headed sentinel:" 

" Another incident, illustrating the King's courageous presence of mind, was 
related by the veteran. While sojourning at Audi (this was several centuries 
ago), a wing of the palace took fire, the whole staircase was in flames, and in the 
highest story was a feeble old woman, apparently cut off from any means of 
escape. His Majesty offered two thousand francs to any one who would save 



42 



THE RECEPTION PARADE. 



her from destruction, but no one pre- 
sented himself. The King did not stop 
to deliberate ; he wrapped his robes 
closely" about him, called for a wet cloth 
— which he threw aside — then rushed 
to his carriage, and drove rapidly to the 
theatre, where he passed the evening 
listening to the singing of ' If ever I 
cease to love.' " 

This is published seriously in the 
journals, next to the news and editorial 
paragraphs; and yearly, at one o'clock 
on the appointed day, the King, ac- 
companied by Warwic 





'When Rex and his train enter the queer old streets, the balconies are crowded 
with spectators." [Page 43.] 



of the Empire, and by the 
Lord High Admiral, who is 
always depicted as suffering 
untold pangs from gout, ar- 
rives on Canal street, sur- 
rounded by troops of horse 
and foot, fantastically dressed, 
and followed by hundreds of 
maskers. Sometimes he 
comes up the river in a 
beautiful barge and lands 
amid thunderous salutes from 
the shipping at the wharves. 
This parade, which is grad- 
ually becoming one of the 
important features of the Car- 
nival, is continued through 
all the principal streets of the 
city. The Bceuf-Gras — the 
fat ox —is led in the proce?- 



THE BCEUF GRAS CARNIVAL SPORTS. 



43 



sion. The animal is gayly decorated with flowers and garlands. Mounted on 
pedestals extemporized from cotton-floats arc dozens of allegorical groups, and 
the masks, although not so rich and costly as those of Comus and his crew, are 
quite as varied and mirth-provoking. The costumes of the King and his suite 
are gorgeous; and the troops of the United States, disguised as privates of 
Arabian artillery and as Egyptian spahis, do escort-duty to his Majesty. Rumor 
hath it, even, that on one occasion, the ladies of New Orleans presented a flag to 
an officer of the troops of "King Rex" (sic), little suspecting that it was there- 
after to grace the Federal barracks. Thus the Carnival has its pleasant 
waggeries and surprises. 

Froissart thought the English amused themselves sadly ; and indeed, com- 
paring the Carnival in Louisiana with the Carnival in reckless Italy, one might 
say that the Americans masquerade grimly. There is but little of that wild 
luxuriance of fun in the streets of New Orleans which has made Italian 
cities so famous ; people go to their sports with an air of pride, but not of 
all-pervading enjoyment. In the French quarter, when Rex and his train enter 
the queer old streets, there are shoutings, chaffings, and dancings , the children 
chant little couplets on Mardi-Gras ; and the balconies are crowded with spec- 
tators. But the negroes make a somewhat sorry show in the masking ; their 
every-day garb is more picturesque. 

Carnival culminates at night, after Rex and the "day procession" have retired. 



K 






V 




'The joyous, grotesque maskers appear upon the ball-room floor." [Page 44. ] 



44 MASQUERADES THE KING'S AUTHORITY. 

Thousands of people assemble in dense lines along the streets included in the 
published route of march ; Canal street is brilliant with illumination, and swarms 
of persons occupy every porch, balcony, house-top, pedestal, carriage and mule- 
car. Then comes the train of Comus, and torch-bearers, disguised in outre 
masks, light up the way. After the round through the great city is completed, 
the reflection of the torch-light on the sky dies away, and the Krewe betake 
themselves to the Varieties Theatre, and present tableaux before the ball opens. 

This theatre, during the hour or two preceding the Mardi-Gras ball, offers 
one of the loveliest sights in Christendom. From floor to ceiling, the 
parquet, dress-circle and galleries are one mass of dazzling toilets, none but 
ladies being given seats. White robes, delicate faces, dark, flashing eyes, 
luxuriant folds of glossy hair, tiny, faultlessly-gloved hands, — such is the vision 
that one sees through his opera-glass. 

Delicious music swells softly on the perfumed air ; the tableaux wax and 
wane like kaleidoscopic effects, when suddenly the curtain rises, and the joyous, 
grotesque maskers appear upon the ball-room floor. They dance ; gradually 
ladies and their cavaliers leave all parts of the galleries, and come to join them ; 
and then, 

"No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet, 
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet." 

Meantime, the King of the Carnival holds a levee and dancing party at 
another place ; all the theatres and public halls are delivered up to the vota- 
ries of Terpsichore ; and the fearless, who are willing to usher in Lent with 
sleepless eyes, stroll home in the glare of the splendid Southern sunrise, yearly 
vowing that each Mardi-Gras has surpassed its predecessor. 

Business in New Orleans is not only entirely suspended on Shrove Tuesday 
(Mardi-Gras), but the Carnival authorities have absolute control of the city. 
They direct the police ; they arrest the mayor, and he delivers to them the keys, 
Avhiie the chief functionaries of the city government declare their allegiance 
to " Rex ;" addresses are delivered, and the processions move. The theatres 
are thrown open to the public, and woe betide the unhappy manager who 
dares refuse the order of the King to this effect. On one occasion a well- 
known actor arrived in the city during the festivities to fulfill an engagement, 
but as the managers of the theatre at which he was to act had refused 
to honor the King's command for free admission to all, the actor was at once 
arrested, taken to the "den" of the Earl -Marshal, and there kept a close 
prisoner until a messenger arrived to say that the recalcitrant manager had 
at last "acknowledged the corn." The violet is the royal flower; the imperial 
banner is of green and purple, with a white crown in the centre ; and the anthem 
of the mystic monarch is, "If ever I cease to love." The accumulation of 
costumes and armor, all of which are historically accurate, is about to result in 
the establishment of a valuable museum. 

The artist's pencil has reproduced in these pages one of the many comical 
incidents which enliven the Carnival tide, and calls his life sketch "Beauty and 



STREET CRIES AND STREET SCENES. 



45 




the Beast." From the gallery of 
Varieties Theatre, many bright eyes are 
in vain endeavoring to pierce the dis- 
guise under which a fashionable member 
of the Comus Krewe parades before 
their gaze. 

From early morning until nightfall 
the same quaint, distorted street-cries 
which one hears in foreign cities ring 
through the streets of New Orleans; 
and in the French quarter they are 
mirth-provoking, under their guise of 
Creole patois. The Sicilian fruit-sellers 
also make their mellifluous dialect heard 
loudly ; and the streets always resound 
to the high - pitched voice of some negro 
who is rehearsing his griefs or joys in 
the most theatrical manner, 
beggars encumber the steps of various 
banks and public edifices, sitting for 
hours together with open, outstretched 
hands, almost too lazy to close them over 
the few coins the passers-by bestow. A 
multitude of youthful darkies, who have 
no visible aim in existence but to sport 
in the sun, abound in the American 
quarter, apparently well fed and happy. 
The mass of the negroes are reek- 



Many bright eyes are in vain endeavoring to pierce 
the disguise." 



4 6 



THE NEW.- ORLEANS MARKETS. 




lessly improvident, living, as in all 
cities, crowded together in ill-built 
and badly-ventilated cabins, the 
ready victims for almost any fell 
disease. 

Next to the river traffic, the New 
Orleans markets are more pic- 
turesque than anything else apper- 
taining to the city. They lie near 
the levee, and, as markets, are in- 
deed clean, commodious, and always 
well stocked. But they have an- 
other and an especial charm to the 
traveler from the North, or to him 
who has never seen their great 
counterparts in Europe. The 
French market at sunrise on Sun- 
day morning is the perfection of 
vivacious traffic. In gazing upon 
the scene, one can readily imagine 
himself in some city beyond the 
seas. From the stone houses, bal- 
conied, and fanciful in roof and 
window, come hosts of plump and 
pretty young negresses, chatting in 
their droll patois with monsieur the 
fish- dealer, before his wooden bench, 
or with the rotund and ever-laugh- 
ing madame who sells little piles 
of potatoes, arranged on a shelf 
like cannon balls at an arsenal, or 
chaffering with the fruit-merchant, 
while passing under long, hanging 
rows of odorous bananas and pine- 
apples, and beside heaps of oranges, 
whose color contrasts prettily with 
the swart or tawny faces of the 
purchasers. 

During the morning hours of 
each day, the markets are veritable 
bee-hives of industry ; ladies and 
servants flutter in and out of the 
long passages in endless throngs; 
but in the afternoon the stalls are 
nearly all deserted. One sees deli- 



MARKET TYPES 



47 



cious types in these markets; he may wander for months in New Orleans without 
meeting them elsewhere. There is the rich savage face in which the struggle of 
Congo with French or Spanish blood is still going on; there is the old French 
market-woman, with her irrepressible form, her rosy cheeks, and the bandanna 




"Passing under long, hanging rows ot bananas and pine-apples." [Page 4O. J 

wound about her head, just as one may find her to this day at the Halles 
Centrales in Paris; there is the negress of the time of D'Artaguette, renewed in 
some of her grandchildren ; there is the plaintive-looking Sicilian woman, who 
has been bullied all the morning by rough negroes and rougher white men as 
she sold oranges; and there is her dark, ferocious-looking husband, who handles 
his cigarette as if he were strangling an enemy. 

In a long passage, between two of the market buildings, where hundreds 
of people pass hourly,' sits a silent Louisiana Indian woman, with a sack of 
gumbo spread out before her, and with eyes downcast, as if expecting harsh 
words rather than purchasers. 

Entering the clothes market, one finds lively Gallic versions of the Hebrew 
female tending shops where all articles are labeled at such extraordinarily low 
rates that the person who manufactured them must have given them away; qua- 
vering old men, clad in rusty black, who sell shoe-strings and cheap cravats, 
but who have hardly vitality enough to keep the flies off from themselves, not 
to speak of waiting on customers ; villainous French landsharks, who have 
eyes as sharp for the earnings of the fresh-water sailor as ever had a Gotham 



4 8 



A BABEL OF TRADE 



shanghai merchant for those of a salt-water tar; mouldy old dames, who look 
daggers at you if you venture to insist that any article in their stock is not 
of finest fabric, and quality; and hoarse- voiced, debauched Creole men, who 
almost cling to you in the energy of their pleading for purchases. Some- 
times, too, a beautiful black-robed girl leans over a counter, displaying her 
superbly -moulded arms, as she adjusts her knitting- work. And from each 
and every one of the markets the noise rises in such thousand currents of 
patois, of French, cf English, of good-natured and guttural negro accent, 
that one cannot help wondering how it is that buyer and seller ever come 
to any understanding at all. 

Then there are the flowers! Such marvelous bargains as one can have in 
bouquets! Delicate jessamines, modest knots of white roses, glorious orange 
blossoms, camelias, red roses, tender pansies, exquisite verbenas, the luscious 
and perfect virgin's bower, and the magnolia in its season; — all these are 
to be had in the markets for a trivial sum. Sometimes, when a Havana 
or a Sicilian vessel is discharging her cargo, fruit boxes are broken open ; 
and then it is a treat to see swarms of African children hovering about the 
tempting piles, from which even the sight of stout cudgels will not frighten 
them. 

In the winter months the markets are crowded with strangers before six 
o'clock every morning. Jaunty maids from New England stroll in the passages, 




'One sees delicious types in these markets." [Page 47] 



MORNINGS IN THE MARKETS. 



49 




long passage, between two of the market buildings, sits a silent 
Louisiana Indian woman." [Page 47.] 



escorted by pale and querulous invalid fathers, 
or by spruce young men, who swelter in their 
thick garments, made to be worn in higher lati- 
tudes. While New York or Boston ladies sip 
coffee in a market-stall, groups of dreamy-eyed 
negro girls surround them and curiously scan the 
details of their toilets. Black urchins grin con- 
fidingly and solicit alms as the blond Northerner 
saunters by. Perchance the 
Bostonian may hear a silvery 
voice, whose owner's face is 
buried in the depths of 
a sun-bonnet, exclaim — 
" There goes a regular 
Yankee !" 

Sailors, too, from the 
ships anchored in the river, 
promenade the long pas- 
sage-ways ; the accents of 
twenty languages are heard; 
and the childlike, comical 
French of the negroes rings 
out above the clamor. 



Wagons from the country clatter 
over the stones ; the drivers sing 
cheerful melodies, interspersed with 
shouts of caution to pedestrians as 
they guide their restive horses 
through the crowds. Stout colored 
women, with cackling hens dangling 
from their brawny hands, gravely 
parade the long aisles ; the fish- 
monger utters an apparently incom- 
prehensible yell, yet brings crowds 
around him ; on his clean block lies 
the pompano, the prince of Southern 
waters, which an enthusiastic ad- 
mirer once described as " a just fish 
made perfect," or a "translated shad." 
Towards noon the clamor ceases, 
the bustle of traffic is over, and the 
market-men and women betake 
themselves to the old cathedral, in 
whose shadowed aisles they kneel 
for momentary worship. 
4 




! Stout colored women, with cackling hens dangling from 
their brawny hands." 



IV. 



THE COTTON TRADE — THE NEW ORLEANS LEVEES. 

IOTTON furnishes to New Orleans much of its activity and the sinews of 
its trade. It stamps a town, which would otherwise resemble some 
decayed but still luxurious European centre, with a commercial aspect. Amer- 



c 




"These boats, closely ranged in long rows by the levee. 
[Page 52.] 



icans and Frenchmen are alike inter- 
ested in the growth of the crop 
throughout all the great section drained 
by the Mississippi and its tributaries. 
They rush eagerly to the Exchange to 
read the statements of sales, and rates, 
and bales on hand; and both are intensely excited when there is a large arrival 
from some unexpected quarter, or when the telegraph informs them that some 
packet has sunk, with hundreds of bales on board, while toiling along the 
currents of the Arkansas or Red rivers. 

In the American quarter, during certain hours of the day, cotton is the only 
subject spoken of; the pavements of all the principal avenues in the vicinity of 
the Exchange are crowded with smartly- dressed gentlemen, who eagerly discuss 
crops and values, and who have a perfect mania for preparing and comparing 
the estimates at the basis of all speculations in the favorite staple; with young 
Englishmen, whose mouths are filled with the slang of the Liverpool market; 



GROWTH OF THE COTTON TRADE. 51 

and with the skippers of steamers from all parts of the West and South-west, 
each worshiping at the shrine of the same god. 

From high noon until dark the planter, the factor, the speculator, flit fever- 
ishly to and from the portals of the Exchange, and nothing can be heard above 
the excited hum of their conversation except the sharp voice of the clerk read- 
ing the latest telegrams. 

New Orleans receives the greater portion of the crop of Louisiana 
and Mississippi, of North Alabama, of Tennessee, of Arkansas, and Florida. 
The gross receipts of cotton there amount to about thirty-three and one- 
third per cent, of the entire production of the country. Despite the 
abnormal condition of government and society there, the natural tendency 
is towards a rapid and continuous increase of cotton production in the 
Gulf States. 

But the honor of receiving the Texas crop, doubled, as it soon will be, as 
the result of increased immigration, favoring climate, and cheap land, will be 
sharply disputed by Galveston, one of the most ambitious and promising of the 
Gulf capitals; and the good burghers of New Orleans must look to a speedy 
completion of their new railways if they wish to cope successfully with the 
wily and self-reliant Texan. 

Judging from the progress of cotton-growing in the past, it will be tremend- 
ous in future. In 1824-25 the cotton crop of the United States was 569,249 
bales; in 1830-31, it ran up to 1,038,000 bales; during '37-38 it reached as 
high as 1,800,000 bales; and eleven years later was 2,700,000 bales. In 1859- 
'60 the country's cotton crop was 4,669,770 bales; in 1860-61 it dropped to 
3,656,000 bales. Then came the war. In the days of slave labor, planters did 
not make more than a fraction of their present per cent. They themselves 
attended very little to their crops, leaving nearly everything to the overseers. 
Cotton raising is now far more popular in the Gulf States than it was before the 
war, although it has still certain distressing drawbacks, arising from the incom- 
plete organization of labor. The year after the close of the war, 2,193,000 
bales were produced, showing that the planters went to work in earnest to 
retrieve their fallen fortunes. From that time forward labor became better 
organized, and the production went bravely on. In 1866 -'67 it amounted to 
1,951,000 bales, of which New Orleans received 780,000; in 1867 -'68 to 
2,431,000 bales, giving New Orleans 668,000; in 1868-69 to 2,260,000, 
841,000 of which were delivered at New Orleans; in 1869-70 to 3,114,000, 
and New Orleans received 1,207,000; in 1870-71 to 4,347,000, giving the 
Crescent City 1,548,000; and in 1871-72 to 2,974,000, more than one-third 
of which passed through New Orleans. The necessity of a rapid multipli- 
cation of railroad and steamboat lines is shown by the fact that more than 
150,000 bales of the crop of 1 870-7 1 remained in the country, at the close 
of that season, on account of a lack of transportation facilities. From 1866 
to 1872, inclusive, the port of New Orleans received 6,114,000 bales, or fully 
one-third of the entire production of the United States. The receipts from 
the Red River region alone at New Orleans for 1871-72, by steamer, were 



52 



THE WHARFMEN. 



they amounted to 284,313 bales; and the 
metropolis 89,084 bales in 1871-72, and 




197,386 bales; for i870-'7i 
Ouachita River sent to the 
151,358 in 1870-71. 

Knowing these statistics, 
one can hardly wonder at the 
vast masses of bales on the levee 
at the landings of the steamers, 
nor at the numbers of the boats 
which daily arrive, their sides 
piled high with cotton. About 
these boats, closely ranged in 
long rows by the levee, and 
seeming like river monsters 
which have crawled from the 
ooze to take a little sun, the 
negroes swarm in crowds, chat- 

..iii 1 j "Whenever there is a lull in the work they sink down on the cotton bales." 

ting in the broken, colored 

English characteristic of the river-hand. They are clad in garments which 
hang in rags from their tawny or coal black limbs. Their huge, naked chests 
rival in perfection of form the works of Praxiteles and his fellows. Their arms 

are almost constantly 
bent to the task of re- 
moving cotton bales, 
and carrying boxes, 
barrels, bundles of 
every conceivable 
shape and size ; but 
whenever there is a lull 
in the work they sink 
down on the cotton 
bales, clinging to them 
like lizards to a sunny 
wall, and croon to 
themselves, or crack 
rough and good- 
natured jokes with one 
another. Not far from 
the levee there is a 
police court, where 
they especially delight 
to lounge. 

In 1871-72 (the 
commercial year ex- 
tends from September 

" Not far from the levee, there is a police court, where they especially delight C ■»- K \ 4-V> 

to lounge." to oeptemoer^ tne 




PLANTERS FACTORS FREED MEN TRADERS. 53 

value of the cotton received at New Orleans was $94,430,000; in iSyo-'yi it 
was $101,000,000; and in 1869-70 even $120,000,000. The difference in 
the value of the crops during that period was very great. In 1869—70 cotton 
sold for nearly $100 per bale, and in 1870-71 it had depreciated to an average 
of $65 per bale. Until the facilities for speedy transportation have been greatly 
increased, a glut of the market, produced by a successful conduct of the year's 
labor on the majority of the plantations, will continue to bring prices down. 

The whole character of the cotton trade has been gradually changing since 
the war. Previous to that epoch a large portion of the business was done 
directly by planters through their merchants; but now that the plantations are 
mainly worked on shares by the freedmen, the matter has come into the hands 
of country traders, who give credits to the laborers during the planting 
seasons, and take their pay in the products of the crop, in harvest time. 
These speculators then follow to market the cotton which they have thus 
accumulated in small lots, and look attentively after it until it has been delivered 
to some responsible purchaser, and they have pocketed the proceeds. 

They often pay the planter and his cooperating freedmen a much higher 
price for cotton than the market quotations seem to warrant; but they always 
manage to retain a profit, rarely allowing a freedman to find that his season's toil 
has done more than square his accounts with the acute trader who has meantime 
supplied him and his family with provisions, clothing, and such articles of luxury 
as the negro's mind and body crave. Shortly after the war there was trouble 
between planters and factors ; and it is not probable that much, if any, business 
will hereafter be transacted by the latter directly with the planter, though upon 
the arrival of the crop in New Orleans the cotton factor becomes the chief 
authority. Business is largely done between buyer and seller on the basis of a 
confidence which seems to the casual observer rather reckless, but which custom 
has made perfectly safe. 

The Cotton Exchange of New Orleans sprang into existence in 1870, and 
merchants and planters were alike surprised that they had not thought its advan- 
tages necessary before. It now has three hundred members, and expends thirty 
thousand dollars annually in procuring the latest commercial intelligence, and 
maintaining a suite of rooms where the buyer and seller may meet, and which 
shall be a central bureau of news. The first president of the Exchange was the 
well-known E. H. Summers, of Hilliard, Summers & Co., of New Orleans; the 
second and present one is Mr. John Phelps, one of the principal merchants of 
the city.* The boards of the Exchange are carefully and thoroughly edited, and 
are always surrounded by a throng of speculators, as well as by the more staid 
and important of the local merchants. During the busy season, the labor at the 
Exchange, and in the establishments of all the prominent merchants and factors, 
is almost incessant. 

* The writer takes this occasion to acknowledge his indebtedness to Secretary Hester of the 
Cotton Exchange of New Orleans, and to Mr. Parker of the Picayune, for many interesting 
details in this connection; to Hon. Charles Gayarre for access to historical portraits; and to 
Collector Casey and his able deputy, Mr. Champlin, for reference to official statistics. 



54 THE COTTON EXCHANGE MANUFACTURES. 

In the months between January and May, when the season is at its height, 
clerks and patrons work literally night and day ; so that when the most exhaust- 
ing period of the year arrives, finding themselves thoroughly overworked, they 
leave the sweltering lowlands, and fly to the North for rest and cool refuge. 
New Orleans is accused of a lack of energy, but her cotton merchants are more 
energetic than the mass of Northern traders and speculators, working, as they do, 
with feverish impulse early and late. One well-known cotton factor, whose 
transactions amount to nearly $12,000,000 yearly, gets to his desk, during the 
season, long before daylight, — and that, in the climate of the Gulf States, comes 
wonderfully early. 

The railroad development of the South since the war has metamorphosed the 
whole cotton trade of New Orleans. Cotton which once arrived in market in 
May now reaches the factor during the preceding December or January. The 
Jackson and Mobile roads did much to effect this great change, and when 
rail communication with Texas is secured, it will bring with it another marked 
difference in the same direction. 

The sugar interest once left the most money in New Orleans; now cotton 
is the main stay. It is estimated that each bale which passes through the 
market leaves about seven dollars and fifty cents. Most of the business with 
England is done by cable, and the telegraph bills of many prominent firms 
are enormous. The Board of Arbitration and Board of Appeals of the Exchange 
make all decisions, and have power to expel any unruly member. 

The Louisiana capitalists have given some attention to the manufacture of 
cotton/ and the factories which have already been established are clearing from 
eighteen to twenty-five per cent, per annum. There are two of these factories 
in New Orleans, each of which consumes about one thousand bales yearly ; 
a third is located at Beauregard, and a fourth in the penitentiary at Baton 
Rouge. The consumption by all the Southern cotton mills, during the three 
years closing with 1872 amounted to two hundred and ninety-one thousand 
bales, and is increasing at a rapid rate. Each new railway connection enlarges 
the city's claims as a cotton mart. The Jackson Railroad, during the com- 
mercial year 1871-72, brought into it forty thousand bales, thus adding about 
four million dollars to the trade. 

When the levees are crowded with the busy negroes, unloading cotton 
from the steamboats, the apparent confusion is enough to turn a stranger's 
head; yet the order is perfect. Each of the steamers has its special stall, into 
which it swings with grace and precision, to the music of a tolling bell and an 
occasional hoarse scream from the whistle ; and the instant the cables are made 
fast and the gangways swung down, the "roustabouts" are on board, and busily 
wheeling the variously branded bales to the spaces allotted them on the wharves. 

The negroes who man the boats running up and down the Mississippi are not 
at all concerned in the discharging of cargoes, being relieved from that duty 
by the regular wharfmen. There is a rush upon the pile of bales fifty-feet 
high on the capacious lower deck of a Greenville and Vicksburg, a Red River, 
or a Ouachita packet, and the monument to the industry of a dozen planters 



DISCHARGING CARGOES. 



55 




' The cotton thieves. 



vanishes as if by magic. Myriads of little flags, each ornamented with different 
devices, flutter from various points along the wharves; and as the blacks 
wheel the cotton past the "tally-man" standing near the steamer's gangways, 
he notes the mark on each bale, and in a loud voice calls out to him who 
is wheeling it the 
name of the sign \^ 
on the flag under 
which it is to rest = - : 
until sold and re- 
moved. While the 
bales remain on the 
levees, the cotton 
thieves now and 
then steal a pound 
or two of the prec- 
ious staple. 

This army of 
"roustabouts" is an 
ebony- breasted, 
tough-fisted, bul- 
let-headed, toiling, 
awkward mass ; but 

it does wonders at work. It is generally good-humored, even when it grum- 
bles; is prodigal of rude, cheerful talk and raillery; has no secrets or jealousies; 
is helpful, sympathetic, and familiar. It leaps to its work with a kind of con- 
centrated effort, and, as soon as the task is done, relapses into its favorite 
condition of slouch. 

Neither the sharp voices of the skippers, nor the harsh orders of the masters of 

the gangs, nor the cheery 
and mirth-provoking res- 
ponses of the help, mingled 
with the sibilations of es- 
caping steam, the ringing 
of countless bells, and the 
moving and rumbling of 
drays, carts and steam-cars 
can drown or smother the 
jocund notes of the negro's 
song. His arms and limbs 
and head keep time to the 
harmony, as he trundles 
the heavy bale along the 
planks. 

When he pauses from 
his work, you may see his 




56 



SMALL MERCHANTS. 



dusky wife or daughter, in a long, closely- fitting, trim calico gown, and a 
starched gingham sun-bonnet, giving him his dinner from a large tin pail ; or 
you may find him patronizing one of the grimy old dames, each of whom 
looks wicked enough to be a Voudou Queen, who are always seated at quiet 
corners with a basket of coarse but well-prepared food. Small merchants 
( thrive along the levee. There is the old apple and cake woman, black and 
fifty, blundering about the wharf's edge ; there is the antiquated and moss- 
grown old man who cowers all day beside a little cart filled with cans of ice- 
cream; there is the Sicilian fruit- seller, almost as dark visaged as a negro; 
there is the coffee and sausage man, toward whom, many a time daily, black 
and toil-worn hands are eagerly outstretched ; and bordering on Canal street, 

all along the walks leading from 
the wharf, are little booths filled 
with negroes in the supreme stages 
of shabbiness, who feast on chicken 
and mysterious compounds of 
vegetables, and drink alarming 
draughts of " whiskey at five cents 
a glass." The sailor on the Mis- 
sissippi is much like his white 
brother of more stormy seas, who 
drinks up his wages, gets penitent, 
confesses his poverty, and begs 
again for work. 

At high water, the juvenile 
population of New Orleans perches 
on the beams of the wharves, and 
enjoys a little quiet fishing. For 
two or three miles down the 
river, from the foot of Canal street, 
the levees are encumbered with 
goods of every conceivable des- 
cription. Then the landings cease, 
and, almost level with the bank on which you walk, flows the grand, impetuous 
stream which has sometimes swept all before it on the lowlands where the 
fair Louisiana capital lies, and transformed the whole section between Lake 
Pontchartrain and the present channel into an eddying sea. 

Up the river, commerce of the heavy and substantial order has monopolized 
the space, and you may note in a morning the arrival of a hundred thousand 
bushels of grain, on a single one of the capacious tow-boats of the Mississippi 
Valley Transportation Company. Merchants even boast that the port can supply, 
to outgoing ships, that quantity daily from the West ; and that the lack of 
transportation facilities often causes an accumulation of three hundred thousand 
bushels in the New Orleans storehouses. Up and down the levees run the branch 
lines of the Jackson, the Louisiana and Texas, and the New Orleans, Mobile and 




" The Sicilian fruit-seller." 



NIGHT ON THE LEVEES. 



57 




"At high water, the juvenile population perches on the beams of the wharves, 
and enioys a little quiet fishing." [Page 56.] 



Texas railways, and teams drive recklessly on the same tracks on which incoming 
trains are drawn by rapidly moving locomotives. The freight depots, the recep- 
tion sheds and the warehouses are crammed with jostling, sweating, shouting, 
black and white humanity ; and, in the huge granite Custom- House, even politics 
has to give way, .,-,... ~^=__ _- - _ ^= ^____ = = ^_^ 

from time to time, 
before the tor- 
rents of business. 
At night a great 
silence falls on 
the levee. Only 
the footsteps of 
the watchmen, 
or of the polite, 
but consequen- 
tial negro police- 
man, are heard 
on the well-worn 
planks. Now and 
then an eye of 
fire, the lamp 
of an incoming 

steamer, peers out of the obscurity shrouding the river, or glides athwart the 
moonlight, and three hoarse screams announce an arrival. Along the shore, 
a hundred lights twinkle in the water, and turn the commonest surroundings into 

enchantment. There is little sign of life from any of 
the steamers at the docks, though here and there a 
drunken river-hand blunders along the wharves 
singing some dialect catch; but with early sun-peep 
comes once more the roar, the rush, the rattle ! 

The coastwise trade is one of the important 
elements of the commerce of New Orleans. Of the 
total tonnage entered and cleared from that port 
during the fiscal year 1871-72, fifty-four per cent, 
or 1,226,000 tons, belonged to this trade, representing 
something like $125,000,000; while the foreign trade 
was only $109,000,000 for the same period. During 
the commercial year ending September 30, 1872, 
two thousand five hundred and nine steamboats, 
comprising a tonnage of 3,500,000 tons burthen, 
arrived at the port. The value of the principal 
articles brought in by these boats was $160,000,000,. 
the up-river cargoes amounting to about $90,000,000. 
It is, therefore, fair to estimate the net value of 

"The poUte.^con^uential negro ^ CQmmerce at nearly $ 4 o ,000,000 per annum. 




$8 THE COMMERCE OF NEW ORLEANS. 

Now let us take the actual figures of the commerce of the Gulf for one 
year: that from September, 1871, to September, 1872. 

Coastwise trade $135,000,000 

Galveston trade 25,000,000 

Mobile trade 24,000,000 

Exports from New Orleans 90,800,000 

Imports to New Orleans 18,700,000 

Cuban trade 150,000,000 

Porto Rico 25,000,000 

Mexico 35,000,000 

This, exclusive of the Darien and Central American trade, now so rapidly 
increasing, makes a grand total of more than five hundred millions of dollars.* 

* The collection district, of which New Orleans is the chief port, embraces all the shores, 
inlets, and waters within the State of Louisiana east of the Atchafalaya, not including the 
waters of the Teche, of the Ohio river, or the several rivers and creeks emptying into it, or 
of the Mississippi or any of its tributaries except those within the State of Mississippi. The 
district extends on the coast from the western boundary of Mississippi, on Lake Borgne, to the 
Atchafalaya ; and the ports of delivery, to which merchandise can be shipped under transporta- 
tion bond, are as follows : Bayou St. John and Lake Port, in Louisiana ; Memphis, Nashville, 
Chattanooga and Knoxville, in Tennessee; Hickman and Louisville, in Kentucky; Tuscumbia, 
in Alabama ; Cincinnati, in Ohio ; Madison, New Albany and Evansville, in Indiana ; Cairo, 
Alton, Ouincy, Peoria and Galena, in Illinois; Dubuque, Burlington and Keokuk, in Iowa; 
Hannibal and St. Louis, in Missouri, and Leavenworth, in Kansas. The shipment of merchan- 
dise, under transportation bond, has increased steadily from $1,736,981 in 1866 to $5,502,427 in 
1872; the value of merchandise imported, from $10,878,365 to $20,006,363; and domestic 
exports, from $89,002,141 to $95,970,592, in the same period. The total value of the mer- 
chandise imported during those years is $102,305,014; the total of domestic exports amounted 
to $608,871,013, and the whole amount of revenue collected, to $35,140,906. 

The receipts from customs at New Orleans for 1872 were very much diminished by the large 
shipments of goods in bond to the interior cities of Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, 
Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., the duties on which were collected at those ports respectively. 
From 1866 to 1872 inclusive, the movement of the port included 2,852 foreign vessels, with a 
tonnage of 1,547,747 tons, and 1,773 American ships, with a tonnage of 1,100,492. The rev- 
enue receipts at New Orleans have been largely diminished by the removal of the duties on 
coffee — the importations of that article during the seven years following 1866 amounting to 
155,953,213 pounds, valued at $16,511,602. The magnitude of the trade of the port may also 
be well illustrated by showing the importations of sugar and railroad iron for the same time. 
Of the former article there were imported 263,918,978 pounds, worth $14,531,960, and of the 
latter 480,043 tons, valued at $15,299,642. 

It will be seen that the imports are small in quantity as compared with the exports when 
the cotton is counted in — the imports amounting to only about one-seventh of the exports ; but 
this ratio will be much reduced in time, as New Orleans becomes a more economical port. 
Five steamship lines now make the city their point of departure. Three of these, the Liverpool 
Southern, the Mississippi and Dominion, and the State Line Steamship Company, communi- 
cate directly with Liverpool, while other lines are projected. 



V. 



THE CANALS AND THE LAKE — THE AMERICAN QUARTER. 



NEW ORLEANS is built on land from two to four feet below the level 
of the Mississippi river at high water mark. It fronts on a great bend in 
the stream in the form of a semicircle, whence it takes its appellation of the 
"Crescent City," and stretches back to the borders of Lake Pontchartrain, which 

lies several feet below the level of the __.^ ===!==== _ 

Mississippi, and has an outlet on the - 

Gulf of Mexico. The rain-fall, the J ^ 
sewerage of the city, and the surplus 
water from the river, are drained into 
the canals which traverse New 
Orleans, and are thence carried into 
the lake. The two principal canals, 
known as the Old and New Basins, 
are navigable ; steamers of consider- 
able size run through them and the 
lake to the Gulf, and thence along 
the Southern Atlantic coast ; and 
schooners and barks, laden with lum- 
ber and produce, are towed in and 
out by mules. The city is divided 
into drainage districts, in each of 
which large pumping machines are 
constantly worked to keep down the 
encroaching water. Were it not 
for the canals and the drainage system, the low-lying city would, after a 
heavy rain, be partially submerged. A fine levee extends for four and a-half 
miles along the front of Lake Pontchartrain, making a grand driveway ; and as a 
complement to this improvement, it is expected that in a few years the cypress 
swamps will be filled up, and the lake front will be studded with mansions. 
The building of this levee was an imperative necessity, the action of the lake 
making the perfecting of the city's present system of drainage impossible other- 
wise. 

On Sundays the shell road leading northward from Canal street past the 
Metairie and Oakland Parks, by the side of the New Basin, is crowded with 
teams, and the restaurants, half hidden by foliage, echo to boisterous merri- 
ment. But on a week day it is almost deserted. Schooners on the canal glide 




The St. Charles Hotel — New Orleans. [Page 61.] 



6o 



ON LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. 




The New Basin. [Page 59.] 



lazily along; ragged negro boys sit on the banks, sleepily fishing; while the 
intense green of the leaves is beautifully reflected from the water. Arrived near 
the lake, you catch a view of dark water in the canal in the foreground, with a 
gayly-painted sail-boat lying close to the bank; an ornamental gateway just 

beyond; a flock of goats browsing at 
the roadside ; and afar off, a white 
light-house standing lonely on a narrow 
point of land. You may step into a 
sail-boat at the lake, and let a brown, 
barefooted Creole fisherman sail you 
down to the pier where the railroad 
from New Orleans terminates ; then 
back again, up the Bayou St. John, 
until he lands you near the walls of 
the "old Spanish fort." There you 
may find a summer-house, an orchard, and a rose-garden. From the balcony 
you can see a long pier running into the lake ; the sun's gold on the rippling 
water; the oranges in the trees below; the group of sailors tugging at the 
cable of their schooner; the pretty cluster of cottages near the levee's end; 
the cannon, old and dismounted, lying half-buried under the grasses ; the 
wealth of peach-blossoms in the bent tree near the parapet; and a bevy of bare- 
legged children playing about their mother, as she sits on the sward, cutting 
rose-stems, and twisting blossoms into bouquets. 

As evening deepens, you sail home, and, in the dining-room of the restaurant 
near the canal, look out upon the passing barges and boats gliding noiselessly 
townward ; hear the shouts of festive parties as they wander on the levee, or 
along the cypress- girt shore; hear the boatmen singing catches; or watch a 
blood-red moon as it rises slowly, and casts an enchanted light over the burnished 
surface of the water-way. 

A promenade on Canal street is quite as picturesque as any in the French 
quarter. There is the negro boot-black sitting in the sun, with his own splay- 
feet on his blacking-block; and there are the bouquet- sellers, black and white, 
ranged at convenient corners, with baskets filled with breast knots of violets, and 
a world of rose-buds, camelias, and other rich blossoms. The newsboy cries his 
wares, vociferous as 
his brother of Go- 
tham. The " roust- 
abouts" from the 
levee, clad in striped 
trowsers and flannel 
shirts, and in coats 
and hats which they 
seem to have slept 
in for a century, 

hasten homeward tO The old Spanish Fort. 




NEW ORLEANS LADIES "THE GARDEN CITY." 



6l 




dinner, with their cotton-hooks clenched in their brawny hands. The ropers 
for gambling-houses — one of the curses of New Orleans — haunt each con- 
spicuous corner, and impudently scan passers-by. 

From twelve to two the American ladies monopolize Canal street. Hund- 
reds of lovely brunettes may be seen, in carriages, in cars, in couples with 
mamma, or accompanied by the tall, L% _^_ 

dark, thin Southern youth, attired „#■"' t rfS 

in black broadcloth, slouch hat, and ig - 

irreproachable morning gloves. The ,-fjji JjjjjMjH 

confectioners' shops are crowded with 
dainty little women, who have the 
Italian rage for confetti, and the 
sugared cakes of the pastry-cook 
vanish like morning dew. The 
matinees at the American theatres, 
as at the French, begin at noon; and ^m 
at three or half-past three, twice a ^p^i 
week, the tide of beauty floods Canal, \t 
St. Charles, Carondelet, Rampart, and c 
other streets. At evening, Canal 
street is very quiet, and hardly seems 

the main thoroughfare Of a great City. The Universit y ° f Louisiana -New Orleans. [Page 6a.] 

The American quarter of New Orleans is superior to the French in width 
of avenue, in beauty of garden and foliage; but to-day many streets there 
are grass-grown, and filled with ruts and hollows. In that section, not inaptly 
designated the " Garden City," there are many spacious houses surrounded by 
gardens, parks and orchards; orange-trees grow in the yards, and roses clamber 
in. at the windows. The homes of well-to-do Americans, who have been able 
to keep about them some appearance of comfort since the war, are found 

mostly on Louis- 
iana and Napoleon 
avenues and on 
Prytania, Plaque- 
mine, Chestnut, 
Camp, Jena, Cadiz, 
Valence, Bordeaux, 
and St. Charles 
streets. Along St. 
Charles street, near 
Canal, are the fa- 
mous St. Charles 
Hotel; the Acad- 
emy of Music, and 
the St. Charles 
Theatre, both welJ 




VATpTlts THE 



62 



PUBLIC BUILDINGS. 




Christ Church — New Orleans. 



appointed theatrical edifices; and the Masonic, City, and Exposition Hails. 
Opposite the City Hall — one of the noblest public buildings in New Orleans, 
built of granite and white marble, in Grecian Ionic style — is Lafayette 
Square. On its south-western side is the First Presbyterian Church; and at 

its southern extremity the Odd Fellows' Hall, 
where the famous McEnery Legislature held its 
sessions. On Common street, one of the business 
thoroughfares of the town, is the University of 
Louisiana. The city is making its most rapid 
growth in the direction of Carrollton, a pretty 
suburb, filled with pleasant homes, and within 
three-quarters of an hour's ride of Canal street. 

Canal street is bordered by shops of no mean 
pretensions, and by many handsome residences; 
it boasts of Christ Church, the Varieties Theatre, 
the noted restaurant of Moreau, the statue of 
Henry Clay, a handsome fountain, and the new 
Custom- House. The buildings are not crowded 
together, as in New York and Paris; they are 
usually two or three stories high, and along the first 
story runs a porch which serves as a balcony to those dwelling above, and as 
protection from sun and rain to promenaders below. The banks, insurance offi- 
ces, and wholesale stores fronting on Canal street are elegant and modern, 
an improvement in the general tone of business architecture having taken place 
since the war. Under the regime of slavery, little or no attention was paid to 
fine buildings; exterior decoration, 
'save that which the magnificent 
foliage of the country gave, was en- 
tirely disregarded. Now, however, 
the citizens begin to take pride in 
their public edifices. 

The bugbear of yellow fever has, 
for many years, been a drawback to 
the prosperity of New Orleans. The 
stories told of its fearful ravages during 
some of its visitations are startling- 
but there is hope that the complete 
and thorough draining of the city will 
prevent the repetition of such scenes 
and consequent panics in future. The 
inhabitants who remain in the city 
throughout the summer are, in ordi- 
nary seasons, as healthy a people as 
can be found in the United States. 

Although a lifetime Spent in the Soft The Canal street Fountain — New Orleans 




YELLOW FEVER— THE CHARITY HOSPITAL 



63 



climate of Louisiana may render an organism somewhat more languid and 
effeminate than that of the Northerner, there are few of the wretched chronic 
complaints, terminating in lingering illness and painful death, which result 
from the racking conflict of extremes in the New England climate. 




The Charity Hospital — New Orleans. 

Many Louisianians disbelieve in the efficacy of quarantine against the yellow 
fever. They say that, during seventy years, from 1796 to 1870, they had quar- 
antine nineteen times, and in each of those nineteen years the dread fever at 
least showed its ugly face. The war quarantine, they assert, failed every year 
of the four that it was in operation. The Charity Hospital has received cases of 
yellow fever annually for the last fifty years. Only in two cases, however, where 
the proper quarantine precautions had been taken, had the disease assumed the 
proportions of a general plague. The general impression is that the fever will 
certainly carry off unacclimated persons; but physicians in the hospitals assert 
that there has been no evidence of the transmission of the fever in hospital 
wards to unacclimated people; and as they have watched cases for weeks after 
exposure, their testimony should be considered valuable. Previous to the war, 
no proper attention had been paid to drainage and cleanliness of streets in New 
Orleans; and it is the opinion of many 
good authorities that a careful exam- 
ining of all vessels arriving from foreign 
ports, and in town a sanitary police 
of the most rigorous character, will soon 
make the fever a rare and not a very 
dangerous visitor. 

The Charity Hospital is one of the 
noblest buildings in the city, and the 
people of New Orleans have good 
reason to be proud of it. Dating from 
the earliest foundation of the city, it has 
never closed its doors save when acci- 







jap 

The old Maison de Sant£ — New Orleans 



[Page 64.] 



6 4 



HOSPITALS PROTESTANT CHURCHES. 



dent has compelled it to do so temporarily. From the time when the Ursuline 
nuns took charge of it under Bienville until now it has been one of the most 
beneficent charities in the country. No question of race, nationality, religion, 
sex or character hinders from admission a single applicant for repose and heal- 
ing within the walls; and 
the best medical talent is 
placed at the disposition 
of the poorest and meanest 
of citizens. The Asylum 
of St. Elizabeth, and the 
male and female orphan 
asylums, are also note- 
worthy charities. 

The Maison de Sante, 
long one of the most noted 
infirmaries of New Orleans, 

The United States Marine Hospital — New Orleans. ig nOW deserted, and like 

the United States Marine Hospital, which has not been used since i860, is 
rapidly falling into decay. During the war the fine United States Hos- 
pital, which once stood at MacDonough's, on the river opposite New Orleans, 
was destroyed. 

The Protestant churches in the American quarter are good specimens of 
modern church architecture. The oldest of the Episcopal organizations, dating 
back to 1806, is Christ Church, on Canal street, founded by Bishop Chase. 
This church was the germ of Protestantism in the South-west. The present 
edifice is the third erected by the society. The fashionable Episcopal churches 





Trinity Church — New Orleans. 



St. Paul's Church — New Orleans. 



THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES. 



65 



are considered to be Trinity and St. Paul's. Annunciation Church is a fine 
edifice. The McGhee Church, of which Rev. Dr. Tudor is pastor, is the prin- 
cipal of the Methodist Episcopal churches South. The Northern post-bellum 
settlers are mainly Congregational or Methodist, and have gathered at the First 
Congregational Church, _^ k dition, having been 

and at the Methodist j largely aided by North- 

Episcopal Ames Chapel. >. 1 ern missions. As there 

The First Presbyterian ^_~ 1 are one hundred and 

Church Society long en- Jj| sixteen churches in New 

joyed the spiritual guid- HE Orleans, the visitor can 

ance of the eloquent Dr. _^ \ hardly hope to peer into 

Palmer, a divine of na- r^^m% fBll 1 .--> them all; baton Baronne 

tional reputation. The ^^K^'* W' hk l4$llilL street h e ma y steal for a 

principal Baptist society i moment into the shade 

assembles at the Coli- g' ' ' • of the old Jesuit Church, 

seum Place Church. w&M WBk an d, entering the dimly- 

There are great numbers Wjm lf|| lighted nave, see the 

of colored church organ- : black-robed girls at the 

izations, many of which WS*- l\2S« confessional, and the 

are in a flourishing con- F^st Presbyterian church -New Orleans. r i c hly - dresse d women 
making their rounds before the chapels and kneeling, prayer-books in 
hand, beside the market-woman and the serving girl. The Jesuit Church, 
St. Augustine's, St. Joseph's, St. Patrick's, and the Mortuary Chapel, are 



f JOSEPH^ - 





The Catholic Churches of New Orlean 



^CHUftC 



iaow 



among the best of the Catholic religious structures. St. Patrick's has a tower 

190 feet high, modeled after that of the famous minster at York, England. 

The city is not rich in architecture. After the National Capitol, the 

Custom- House is considered the largest public building in the country. It has 

5 



66 



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE THE BRANCH MINT 



a front of 334 feet on Canal street, and nearly the same on the levee. It is 
built entirely of granite from Massachusetts. Begun in 1848, little has been 
done since the war to complete it. As the seat of the United States 
courts, and of the exciting political conventions which have been so intimately 




The Custom-House — New Orleans. 

connected with the present political condition of Louisiana, the Custom-House 
attracts an interest which its architecture certainly could never excite. The 
building still lacks the roof contemplated in the original plan. When General 
Butler was military commander of New Orleans he proposed to erect a tem- 
porary roof, but his recall came before the work was begun. 

The Ionic building at the corner of Esplanade and New Levee streets, once 
used as a United States branch mint, is noted as the place of execution of Mum- 
ford, who tore down the flag which the Federal forces had just raised on the roof 
when in 1862 the city was first occupied by the Northern forces. Mumford was 
hung, by General Butler's order, from a flag-staff projecting from one of the 
windows under the front portico of the main building. 




The United States Branch Mint — New Orleans. 



VI. 

ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER — THE LEVEE SYSTEM — RAILROADS. 
THE FORT ST. PHILIP CANAL. 

THE banks of the Mississippi, within the State of Louisiana, are lovely, the 
richness of the foliage and the luxuriance of the vegetation redeeming 
them from the charge of monotony which might otherwise be urged. Here 
and there a town, as in the case of Plaquemine, has been compelled to recede 
before the encroachments of the river. 

The people of the State have shown rare pertinacity in maintaining the levee 
system. Like the Dutch in Holland, they doggedly assert their right to the 
lowlands in which they live, always braving inundation. They have built, and 
endeavor to maintain in repair, more than 1,500 miles, or 51,000,000 cubic feet 
of levees within the State limits. Their State engineer corps is always at work 
along the banks of the Mississippi, above and below Red River, on the Red 
River itself, on the Lafourche, the Atchafalaya, the Black and Ouachita, and on 
numerous important bayous. 

The work of levee building has been pressed forward even when the Com- 
monwealth has been prostrated by a hundred evils. Detailed surveys are con- 
stantly necessary to insure the State against inundation. The cost value of the 
present system is estimated at about $17,000,000, and it is asserted that the 
future expenditure of a similar sum will be necessary to complete and perfect it. 

Ten years before the war, when Louisiana was in her most prosperous condi- 
tion, she possessed 1,200 miles of levees, and the police juries of the several 
parishes compelled a strict maintenance of them by " inspectors of sections." 
Of course, during the war, millions of cubic feet of levees were destroyed by 
neglect, and for military purposes; and that the State, in her impoverished 
condition, should have been able to rebuild the old, and add new levees in so 
short a time, speaks volumes for her energy and industry, — qualities which 
find a thorough representative in General Jeff Thompson, the present State 
Engineer. 

The Louisiana people claim that the general government should now take the 
building of levees along the Mississippi into its own hands, and their reasoning to 
prove it is ingenious. They say, for instance, that the tonnage of the great river 
amounts during a given year to 1,694,000 tons. They then claim that the 
transit of steamboats gives, by causing waves, an annual blow, equal to the 
whole tonnage of the commerce of the river, against each portion or point of the 
levees, or the banks on which the levees are erected ; and that this blow is 
delivered at the average rate of about six miles an hour, a force equal to 



68 



THE LEVEE SYSTEM — DOWN THE RIVER. 



15,000,000 tons; — a force expended by the commerce of the 'whole Mississippi 
basin upon each lineal foot in the 755 miles of Louisiana levees upon the river! 
On these grounds they object to paying all the expenses of levee building in 
their own State ; and they are supported by able scientists. 

The United States certainly is 
the only power in America which can 
ever control the Mississippi, and pre- 
vent occasional terrible overflows; 
and it is its bounden duty to do it 

By day and night, the journey 
down river in the State of Louisiana 
is alike beautiful, impressive, exhila- 
rating. But when a moonless night 
settles down upon the stream, and 
you float away into an apparent 
ocean on the back of the white 
Leviathan whose throbbing sides 
seem so tireless, the effect is sol- 
emnly grand. 

Sometimes the boat stops at a 
coaling station, and tons of coal are 
laboriously transferred from barges to 
the steamer. An army of negroes 
shovel the glistening nuggets into 
rude hand-barrows, which another 
army, formed into a procession, car- 
ries to the furnaces. 

I went down from Vicksburg on 
one of the larger and finer of the 
steamers; and the journey was a per- 
petual succession of novel episodes. 
At one point, when I supposed we 
"Sometimes the boat stops at a coaling station." were comfortably holding our way in 

the channel, a torch-light flared up, and showed us nearing a scraggy bank. 
The thin, long prow of the boat ran upon the land. Gangways were 
lowered; planks were run out from the boat's side to the bank; forty 
negroes sprang from some mysterious recess below, and huddled before 
the capstan. 

The shower of harmless sparks from the torches cast momentary red gleams 
over the rude but kindly black faces. A sharp-voiced white man, whom I 
learned afterwards to call the "Wasp," because he always flew nervously about 
stinging the sprawling negroes into activity, thrust himself among the laborers. 
Twenty stings from his voice, and the dusky forms plunged into the darkness 
beyond the gangways. Then other torches were placed upon the bank — 
lighting up long wood -piles. 




"wooding up." 



69 



The Wasp flitted restlessly from shore to deck, from deck to shore, while the 
negroes attacked the piles, and, each taking half a dozen sticks, hurried to the 
deck with them. Presently there was an endless procession of black forms 
from the landing to the boat and back through the flickering light, to the 
tune of loud adjurations from the Wasp. Now and then the chain of laborers 
broke into a rude chant, beginning with a prolonged shout, such as 

; " Oh ! I los' my money dar !" 

and followed by a gurgling laugh, as if the singers were amused at the sound of 
their own voices. When any of the darkies stumbled or lagged, the Wasp, 
generally kind and well- 
disposed towards the ne- J?^ ■■ '■'" ' 
groes, despite his rough 
ways, broke into appeal, 
threat, and entreaty, cry- 
ing out raspingly and with, 
oaths, " You, Reuben !" 
"You, Black Hawk!" 
"Come on thar, you 
Washington ! ain't you 
going to hear me!" Now 
and then he would run 
among the negroes, urging 
them into such activity 
that a whole pile would 
vanish as if swallowed by 
an earthquake. In two 
hours and a-half sixty 
cords of wood were trans- 
ferred from the bank to 
the boat, and the Wasp, 
calling the palpitating 
wood-carriers around him, 
thus addressed them: 
" Now, you boys, listen. 
You, Black Hawk, do you 




"The Wasp." 



hear? you and these three, first watch! You, Reuben, and these three, second 
watch !" etc. Then the torches were dipped in the river, and the great white 
boat once more wheeled around into the channel. 

On the shores we could dimly discern huge trees half fallen into the stream, 
and stumps and roots and vines peeping up from the dark waters. We could 
hear the tug-boats groaning and sighing as they dragged along heavily laden 
barges ; and once the light of a conflagration miles away cast a strange, dim 
light over the current. Now and then the boat, whirling around, made for the 
bank, and the light of our torches disclosed a ragged negro holding a mail-bag. 



70 



A LOUISIANA SWAMP. 



Up the swinging gangway clambered one of our deck hands ; the mails were 
exchanged ; the lights went out once more. 

So on, and ever on, a cool breeze blowing from the perfumed banks. Now 
we could see the lights from some little settlement near a bayou emptying into 




' ' Some tract of hopelessly irreclaimable, grotesque water wilderness, 



the stream ; now, the eye of some steamer, and hear the songs of the deck- 
hands as she passed us. Now we moved cautiously, taking soundings, as we 
entered some inlet or detour of the river ; and now paused near some great 
swamp land — some tract of hopelessly irreclaimable, grotesque water wilderness, 
where abound all kinds of noisesome reptiles, birds and insects. 

One should see such a swamp in October, when the Indian summer haze 
floats and shimmers lazily above the brownish-gray of the water ; when a 
delicious magic in the atmosphere transforms the masses of trees and the 
tangled vines and creepers into semblances of ruined walls and tapestries. But 
at any season you see towering white cypresses, shooting their ghostly trunks far 
above the surrounding trees ; or, half rotten at their bases, fallen into the water ; 
the palmettoes growing in little clumps along the borders of treacherous knolls, 
where the earth seemed firm, but where you could not hope with safety to rest 
your feet ; the long festoons of dead Spanish moss hanging from the high boughs 
of the red cypress, which refuses to nourish the pretty parasite ; and the great 
cypress knees, now white, now brown, looming up through the warm haze, and 
peeping from nooks where the water is transparent, seeming like veins in a 
quarry riven by lightning strokes. 

Vista after vista of cypress-bordered avenues, with long lapses of water filling 
them, and little islands of mud and slime, thinly coated with a deceptive foliage, 
stretch before your vision ; a yellowish ray, flashing across the surface of the 
water, shows you where an alligator had shot forward to salute his friend or 



THE RIVER PANORAMA. J I 

attack his enemy ; and a strange mass hanging from some remotest bough, if 
narrowly inspected, proves an eagle's nest, fashioned with a proper care for 
defense. 

You see the white crane standing at some tree root, sullenly contemplating 
the yielding mass of decaying logs and falling vines ; and the owl now and then 
cries from a high perch. The quaint grossbeak, the ugly heron, the dirty-black 
buzzard, the hideous water-goose, with his featherless body and satiric head, 
start up from their nooks as you enter; the water moccasin slides warily into 
the slime ; and if you see a sudden movement in the centre of a leaden-colored 
mass, with a flash or two of white in it, you will do well to beware, for half a 
dozen alligators may show themselves at home there. You may come upon 
some monarch-tree, prostrate and decayed within from end to end. Entering 
it, and tapping carefully as you proceed to frighten away lurking snakes, you 
will find that you can walk through without stooping, even though you are of 
generous height. 

As far as the eye can reach you will see hundreds of ruined trees, great 
stretches of water, forbidding avenues which seem to lead to the bottomless pit, 
vistas as endless as hasheesh visions ; and the cries of strange birds, and the bel- 
lowings of the alligator, will be the only sounds from life. You will be glad to 
steal back to the pure sunlight and the open lowland, to the river and the 
odors of many flowers — to the ripple of the sad-colored current, and the cheery 
songs of the boatmen. 

Some evening, just as sunset is upon the green land and the broad stream, 
you stand high up in the pilot-house, as you float into a channel between low- 
lying islands, clad even to the water's edge with delicate shrubs whose forms are 
minutely reflected in the water. You may almost believe yourself removed out 
of the sphere of worldly care, and sailing to some haven of profoundest peace. 

So restfully will the tender glory of the rose and amethyst of the sunset come 
to you; so softly will the perfume of the jessamines salute your senses; so gently 
will avenue after avenue of verdurous banks, laved by tranquil waters and extend- 
ing beyond the reach of your vision, open before you ; so quietly will the wave 
take from the horizon the benison of the sun's dying fires ; so artfully will the 
perfect purple — the final promise of a future dawn — peep up from the islets' 
rims ere it disappears, that you will be charmed into the same serene content 
which nature around you manifests. From some distant village is borne on the 
breeze the music of an evening bell ; from some plantation-grounds, or a grove 
of lofty trees, comes the burden of a negro hymn, or a jolly song of love and 
adventure. 

Down below, the firemen labor at the seven great furnaces, and throw into 
them cords on cords of wood, tons on tons of coal ; the negroes on the watch 
scrub the decks, or trundle cotton bales from one side of the boat to the other, 
or they lie listlessly by the low rails of the prow, blinking and shuffling and laugh- 
ing with their own rude grace. Above, the magic perfume from the thickets 
fillled with blossoms is always drifting, and the long lines of green islets bathed 
by the giant stream, pass by in rapid panorama. 



72 



TYPES ON A RIVER STEAMER. 



You notice that some little fiend of a black boy, clad in an old woolen cap, a 
flannel shirt whose long flaps hang over his ragged and time-honored trowsers, 
and shoes whose heels are so trodden in that when he walks his motion seems 
to rock the steamer, will, when his comrade is not watching, steal some little arti- 
cle which said comrade can ill afford to lose ; whereupon comrade, in due time 
discovering the loss, will end by complaining of the suspected boy to the Wasp ; 
then you see the Wasp come buzzing and stinging and swearing along the broad 
decks, and calling George Washington to a certain post where he is to face him. 
Perhaps the Wasp will say: "George Washington, Jack says you stole his belt;" 
and then will sting and buzz and swear ; whereupon George Washington, mop- 
ping his black face with the flap of his red flannel over-garment, will say hastily. 
in one indignant sibilation: "Deed to God, hope I die, sah — no sah !" Perhaps 
then the Wasp will make George Washington hold up his hand, and, looking 



him earnestly in the face, 
will say, "George Wash- 
ington, are you going to 
tell me a lie?" with a 
buzz and a sting and a 
swear. 

Whereupon George 
Washington will again and 
defiantly sibilate: "If dat 
nigger say dat, he lied. I 
do' know nuffm about his 
belt nohow. Mus' a los' 
it woodin-up las' night. I 
did n't tetch it ; " but after 
various hand- raisings will 





The monument on the Chalmette 
battle-field. 



finally end by rendering 
up the belt, and retiring 
to the shade of a cotton 
bale, followed by the 
laughter of his com- 
rades. 

You come to a planta- 
tion landing where some 
restive steers are to be 
taken aboard, and notice 
the surprising manner in 
which those playful crea- 
tures toss about the 
negroes who wish to lead 
them on, until one or two 



agile fellows, catching the beasts by the tails, and as many more holding their 
horns, manage to make them walk the narrowest planks. 

Or you come to some landing where a smart-looking young negro man 
comes on board with a quadroon wife ; and you notice a hurried look of surprise 
on some of the old men's faces as the couple are shown a state-room, or as 
they promenade unconcernedly. 

Or a group of chattering French planters, with ruddy complexions and coal 
black eyes and hair, arrive, and the village priest, a fat, stalwart old boy in a 
white choker and a shovel hat, accompanies them; or perhaps a lean, gray-haired 
man, with a strongly marked dialect and a certain contemptuous way of talking 
of modern things, tells you that he remembers the first steamboat but three that 
ever ran upon the Mississippi river, and hints that "times were better then than 
now. That was a right smart o' years ago." 

Descending the river from New Orleans, you go slowly down a muddy- 
colored but broad and strong current, between low and seemingly unstable 
banks. You pass the Chalmette battle-field, where Andrew Jackson won his 
victory over the English, and where Monument Cemetery, the burial place of 



THE MOUTHS OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 73 

many thousand soldiers, killed in the late civil war, is located. The monument 
from which the cemetery takes its name was erected in 1856, to commemorate 
General Jackson's good fight. 

The fears that the levees along the Mississippi would not be able always to 
resist the great body of water bearing and wearing upon them have several 
times been realized. Among the most disastrous instances of the "crevasse" is 
that of May, 18 16, when the river broke through, nine miles above New Orleans, 
destroying numbers of plantations, and inundating the back part of the city. 
Gov. Claiborne adopted the expedient of sinking a vessel in the breach, and 
saved the town. In 1844 the river did much damage along the levee at New 
Orleans; and the inundations of 1868 and 1 871 were severe lessons of the 
necessity of continually strengthening the works. 

Within fifty or sixty miles of the river's mouths, the banks become too low 
for cultivation ; you leave the great sugar plantations behind, and the river 
broadens, until, on reaching the " Head of the Passes," it separates into several 
streams, one of which in turn divides again a few miles from its separation from 
the main river. Beginning at the north and east, these passes, as they are 
called, are named respectively " Pass a l'Outre," " North-east Pass," the " South 
Pass," and "South-west Pass." Across the mouths of these passes bars of mud are 
formed, deposited by the river, which there meeting the salt and consequently 
heavier water of the gulf, runs over the top of it, and, being partially checked, 
the mud is strained through the salt water, and sinks^ at once to the bottom. 

This separation of the fresh from the salt water is maintained in a remarkable 
degree. When the river is high, the river water runs far out to sea, and has 
been seen at fifteen miles from the passes, with as sharply defined a line between 
them as that between oil and water. This is also true with reference to the 
upper and lower strata. Sometimes, when a steamer is running through a dense 
pea-soup colored water on top, the paddle-wheels will displace it sufficiently to 
enable one to see clear gulf water rushing up to fill the displacement. The 
flood tide runs up underneath the river water for a long distance, and, at extra- 
ordinary high tides, is distinctly visible as far as New Orleans, one hundred and 
ten miles above.* The bars change their depth constantly. 

When the river is high, and consequently brings down most mud, the depth 
of the deposit increases with great rapidity ; while in a low stage of the river 
the accumulation is slight. The bars are subject to another and great change, 
believed to be peculiar to the Mississippi; that is, the formation of "mud 
lumps." These mud lumps are cone-shaped elevations of the bottom, often 
thrown up in a few hours, so that although the pilot may find ample depth 
for the largest ship on one day, on the next he may be aground with one 
of a much lighter draught. 

Sometimes the lumps disappear as quickly as formed ; at others they spread, 
show themselves above the water, and gradually grow into islands. It is sup- 

* For these and many other interesting details, the writer gratefully acknowledges his obliga- 
tions to Major C. W. Howell, Captain of United States Engineers, and to Captain Frank Barr, 
United States Revenue Marine. 



74 



IMPROVEMENT OF THE RIVER "PASSES. 



posed that this is the manner in which the long, narrow banks on either side of 
the "passes" have been formed. These cone-shaped lumps of mud are believed 
to be started by the action of carburetted hydrogen gas formed by the decay of 
vegetable matter contained in the river deposits, the substance of the bar being 
loosened by the action of the gas and forced upward until the lump makes its 
appearance above the water ; when, becoming dry, and being continually fed 
by the forces from below, it gradually gains consistency, and forms another link 
in the delta chain, extending into the waters of the Gulf. 

The attention of the United States Government to the necessity of improve- 
ment at the mouths of the Mississippi was first attracted in earnest in 1837, when 
an extended and elaborate survey of the passes and mouths was made by Captain 
Talcot, of the Engineer Corps. To save the commerce of New Orleans it was 
necessary to deepen the channel ; and the plan of dredging with buckets was 
carried into effect as far as a slight appropriation permitted. No farther work 
was then undertaken until 1852, when $75,000 was set aside for it; and a num- 
ber of processes for deepening — such as stirring up the river bottom with suit- 
able machinery, and the establishment of parallel jetties, five miles in length, at 
the mouth of the South-west Pass- — were tried. 

By 1853 a depth of eighteen feet of water had been obtained in the South- 
west Pass by stirring up the river bottom; but in 1856 it was found that no trace 
of the deepening remained. In that year the sum of $300,000 was appropri- 
ated for opening and keeping open, by contract, ship channels through the bars 
at the mouths of the South-west Pass. 

Contractors began work, but unless they labored incessantly, they could not 
keep the channels open; and they retired discomfited. The plan of dragging har- 
rows and scrapers seaward along the bottom of the channel was adopted, thus 
aiding the river-flood to carry the stirred-up matter to deep water; and a depth 
of eighteen feet was maintained upon the bar for one year at a cost of $60,000. 
Other efforts, in 1866 and 1867, were equally costly and of small avail; and in 

1868, the" Essay ons," a steam 
dredge-boat, constructed by 
the Atlantic Works, of Boston, 
was employed upon the bar 
at Pass a 1' Outre. The plan 
of this boat, which had been 
recommended by General 
McAllister, was a powerful 
steamer with a cutting pro- 
peller, which could be lowered 
into the surface of the mud, 
where its rapid revolutions 
would effect the necessary 
"stirring- up." So far as her 
draught permits, the " Essay - 
ons " has been a complete 




THE BALIZE- 



PILOT TOWN. 



75 



pi ■ 



South-west Pass. 



success; and another steamer, whose cutting propeller can work at greater depth, 
and which has been named "McAllister," is now engaged upon the work. The 
main labor with these new boats has been done at the South-west Pass, which 
has become the principal entrance to the Mississippi, and there the United States 
Government is erecting a light-house on iron piles, as the marshes offer but an 
insecure foundation. The improvements at the river's mouth, like those in 
the Red River, Tone's Bayou, the Tangipahoa River, the harbor of Galveston, 
and the Mississippi forts, as well as those on the lakes in the rear of New Orleans, 

are all under the direction of 
I .-..,:- Major C. N. Howell, of the 

Engineer Department. Pass 
; i-Jk J H* a, 1' Outre is generally consid- 

ered by best authorities the 
natural channel for eastward- 
bound and returning ships. 
With its bar opened, none 
such would, it is affirmed, 
ever go to South-west Pass, 
for the reason that they might 
save several hours coming 
in. This pass, properly 
opened, can accommodate three times the number of 
ships which now annually enter the Mississippi. 
The effect on the commerce of New Orleans of the 
bar-formations at the river's mouths is depressing. They cause burdensome taxes 
on the earnings of ships. In 1870 the value of imports at New Orleans amounted 
to only one-seventh of the exports; but if the port were made as economical as 
that of New York, by removing all obstacles to free entrance and exit, the 
imports would soon nearly equal the exports. The Government is at present 
expending about $650,000 annually on the necessary river and harbor improve- 
ments in Louisiana and Texas. Twice that amount might be judiciously invested 
every year. The work on the channel at the Mississippi's outlet must evidently 
be perpetual, unless the plan of a canal is adopted. 

"The Balize," now a little collection of houses at the North-east Pass, was 
a famous place in its day — was, indeed, the port of New Orleans; and 
vessels were often detained there for weeks on the great bar, which had 
been labored upon to but little advantage before the cession of Louisiana 
to the United States. The extensive French military and naval establish- 
ments at the Balize were utterly destroyed by the great hurricanes of 
September, 1740. Now-a-days, the venerable port is almost desolate; a 
few damp and discouraged fishermen linger sadly among the wrecks of 
departed greatness. "Pilot Town," at the South-west Pass, is interesting 
and ambitious. The pilots and fishermen are delightful types, and are 
nearly all worthy seamen and good navigators. At " Pass a l'Outre " and 
" South-west Pass " the Government maintains a " boarding-station " for protec- 




y6 RAILROADS IN LOUISIANA. 

tion of the revenue, and an inspector is sent up to the port of New Orleans with 
each incoming vessel. 

Steaming back to the Louisiana capital on one of the inward-bound vessels, 
leaving behind you the low-lying banks ; the queer towns at the mouths of the 
passes, with their foundations beneath the water; the long lines of pelicans 
sailing disconsolately about the current ; the porpoises disporting above the bars, 
and the alligators sullenly supine on the sand, you will land into the rush and 
whir of the great commerce "on the levee." If it be evening, you will hear the 
hoarse whistles of a dozen steamers, as they back into midstream, the negroes on 
their decks scrambling among the freight and singing rude songs, while the 
loud cries of the captains are heard above the noise of escaping steam. 

One of the most pressing needs of Louisiana is an increase of railway lines. 
The New Orleans, Mobile and Texas road has done much for the commerce of 
the State, and is, undoubtedly, one of the best constructed lines in the country. 
It drains extensive sections of Mississippi and Alabama toward New Orleans. 
The extension of this route to Houston in Texas, and the building of a branch 
from Vermilionville to Shreveport, will do much for the development of the 
commonwealth. The trade between New Orleans and Shreveport, which is 
really immense, was much restricted for many years by the difficulty of navigat- 
ing the Red river, whose tortuous water-ways have latterly been considerably 
improved. The projected "Louisiana Central" railroad, located along the route 
of the Red river for about 200 miles, passing through Alexandria and Natchi- 
toches, will make Shreveport within twelve hours of New Orleans. The journey 
formerly occupied three or four days. Morgan's "Louisiana and Texas" rail- 
road extends from New Orleans to Brashear City on Berwick's Bay, where it 
communicates with a fleet of first-class iron steamers running to Texas ports. 
The branch of this road from Brashear City to Vermilionville, graded years ago, 
might now be completed to advantage. 

The New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern railroad gives a valuable con- 
nection with the North, via Jackson, in Mississippi. A recent enterprise is the 
New Orleans and North-eastern road, which is to cross Lake Pontchartrain on a 
trestle-work, supported on piles, and opening up a delightful location for sub- 
urban residences beyond the lake, is to' push on into the iron and coal regions 
of Alabama. The Illinois Central Railroad Company has built a line from 
Jackson, Tennessee, to the south bank of the Ohio river, opposite Cairo, Illinois, 
bringing New Orleans as near to Chicago by rail as it is to New York, and 
creating an important adjunct to the system for transportation from the North- 
west to the gulf and the ocean. Railroad routes along the banks of the Mis- 
sissippi would give new life to such towns as Baton Rouge, the old capital of 
Louisiana, 129 miles from New Orleans, and Natchez in Mississippi. Baton 
Rouge now has no communication with New Orleans save by steamer. It is 
a lovely town, built on gently sloping banks crowned with picturesque houses, 
the ruined Gothic State Capitol, a substantial Penitentiary, and the Asylum for 
the Deaf and Dumb. It is one of the healthiest towns in the State, and with 
proper facilities for speedy communication with other towns, might be the seat 



THE FORT ST. PHILIP CANAL. 



77 



of a flourishing trade. Routes parallel with the river would be speedily 
built if New Orleans had better outlets and more tonnage. Knowing this, 
the enterprising inhabitants of that city are anxious for the Fort St. Philip 
canal, which shall render the tedious and risky navigation of the passes at the 
Mississippi's mouth unnecessary. 

The project of the Fort St. Philip canal is not entirely due to the sagacity of 
this generation. Forty years ago the Legislature of Louisiana, at the suggestion 
of a distinguished engineer, memorialized Congress on the subject of a canal to 
connect the Mississippi river with the Gulf, leaving the stream a few miles below 
Fort St. Philip and entering the Gulf about four miles south of the island " Le 
Breton." Numerous commercial conventions have endorsed it since that time. 
It would give, by means of a system of locks, a channel which would never be 
subject to the evils now disfiguring the passes at the river's mouth, and would 
communicate directly with deep water. The estimated cost of the work is about 
eight millions of dollars. It is a national commercial necessity, and should be 
undertaken by the Government at once. New Orleans would more than quad- 
ruple her transportation facilities by means of this canal, not only with regard to 
Liverpool, Bremen, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Southampton, Havre, and 
Glasgow, but to New York and Philadelphia. Havana, Lima, and Aspinwall. 




'A Nickel for Daddy.' 



VII. 

THE INDUSTRIES OF LOUISIANA — A SUGAR PLANTATION. 
THE TECHE COUNTRY. 

THE main industries of Louisiana at the present time are the growth of 
cotton, the production of sugar, rice, and wheat, — agriculture in general, — 
and cattle raising. The culture of the soil certainly offers inducements of the 
most astonishing character, and the immigrant who purchases a small tract — 
five to ten acres — of land can, during the first year of possession, make it 
support himself and his numerous family, and can also raise cotton enough on 
it to return the purchase money. 

Vergennes, in his memoir on La Louisia?ze, printed early in this century, 
says: "I will again repeat what I have already many times said — that Louis- 
iana is, without doubt, by reason of the softness of her climate and the beauty 
of her situation, the finest country in the universe. Every European plant, and 
nearly all those of America, can be successfully cultivated there." This was the 
verdict of one who had made a careful survey of the great province then known 
as Louisiana, and especially the tract now comprised in the lowlands. Rice, 
an important article of food, can be raised on grounds which are too low and 
moist for any other species of valuable vegetables, and in the Mississippi basin, 
rice, sugar and corn can be cultivated in close proximity. The fertility of the 
sugar lands is proverbial; and Louisiana is prodigal of fruit of all kinds. With 
but little attention orange and fig-trees prosper and bear splendid crops ; apples 
and peaches are produced in abundance; and grape-bearing lands are to be 
found in all sections of the State. Sugar, cotton, rice and tobacco might all 
be readily cultivated on the same farm in many sections. 

The cultivation of rice, introduced into Louisiana by Bienville, at the time of 
the founding of New Orleans, may be profitably pursued in all the "parishes," 
i. e., counties, on the river and Gulf coasts, and on the high pine lands of the 
northern part of the State. The rice raised on the irrigated lands below New 
Orleans, and in the immediate proximity of the Gulf, is known as "lowland rice;" 
that raised elsewhere as "upland." 

The quality of the staple is constantly improving by cultivation. In i860 
the rice crop of Louisiana amounted to 6,500,000 pounds. There is no good 
reason why it should not now be 60,000,000. Barley and buckwheat flourish 
admirably in the State, and the attention given to the cultivation of wheat since 
the close of the war has accorded singularly gratifying results. The average 
yield in the hill portion of the State is fully equal to that of the Northern States, 
— about twelve bushels to the acre — and in the Red River Valley, where the 



WHEAT THE SUGAR-CANE. 



79 



planters were compelled to devote much of their old cotton land to the pro- 
duction of wheat, for the sake of getting the wherewithal to live, the yield was 
twenty bushels to the acre. 

The wheat yearly gains largely in weight, size and color. It is said that 
wherever the cavalry of the United States camped in Louisiana during the war, 
immense grain fields sprang up from the seed scattered where horses were fed. 
In the swamps of Assumption parish wheat and rye have been known to yield 
forty bushels to the acre. The wheat may be planted in September, October, 
or November, and reaped late in April or early in May. Indian corn does not 
yield well, rarely giving over fifteen bushels to the acre. Marsh, Hungarian 
herbs, and prairie grasses grow in abundance and make excellent hay. Pastur- 
age is perennial, and in the Attakapas the grazing regions are superb. Cotton 
may be cultivated throughout the entire arable portion of the State. 

The cultivation of the sugar-cane in Louisiana merits especial mention. 
One of the most remunerative of industries under the slave system, it has 
been for some time languishing because of the disorganization of labor, and 
because also of the division of large plantations into small farms. For a whole 
year before the sugar crop is ready for the market, a constant outlay is required, 
and the small planters succeed but poorly, while the larger ones have been 
ruined by the war, and have allowed their sugar-houses to decay, and their 
splendid machinery to rust in ditches. 

In 175 1, two ships transporting soldiers to Louisiana, stopped at Hispaniola, 
and the Jesuits on that island sent some sugar-canes and some negroes, used to 
their cultivation, to the brothers of their order in the new colony. The Jesuits 
at New Orleans undertook the culture of the crop, but did not succeed; and it 
was only in 1795 that the seeds became thoroughly naturalized in Louisiana. 

Up to 18 16 the cultivation of the cane was confined to the lower parishes, 
but it is now raised with reasonable success in many other portions of the State. 
From 1828 to 1833, the sugar production in the commonwealth was about 
280,000 hogsheads. The following table will show the amount of the crops of 
each year from 1834 to 1873 inclusive: 



v Production, 

Year - Hogsheads. 

1834 100,000 

1835 30,000 

1836 70,000 

1837 65,000 

1838 70,000 

1839 115,000 

1840 87,000 

184I 90,000 

1842 140,000 

1843 100,000 



v Production, 

Year - Hogsheads. 

1844 200,000 

1845 l86,000 

1846 140,000 

1847 240,000 

1848 220,000 

1849 247,000 

1850 211,000 

185 I 236,000 

1852 321,000 

1853 449,000 



v Production, 

Yean Hogsheads. 

1854 346,000 

1855 231,000 

1856 74,000 

1857 279,000 

1858 362,000 

1859 221,000 

i860 228,000 

l86l 459,000 

1 864.. War, 7,000 
1865 15,000 



Year Production, 

Hogsheads. 

l866 39,000 

1867 37,600 

l868 84,000 

1869. 87,000 

1870 144,800 

187I 128,461 

1872 105,000 

1873 90,000 



The ribbon cane planted in Louisiana was brought from Java, in a ship which 
touched at Charleston. It was hardy, and was at once adopted in all sections of 



80 COOPERATION THE "DELTA." 

the State. But it is thought that it has deteriorated very much, and an associa- 
tion recently sent a gentleman to the islands of the Pacific Ocean and to India 
to search for a fresh supply. He secured some ten thousand cuttings, which 
were so long in transit as to be nearly all destroyed, and parties in the sugar 
interest are now anxious that a government vessel should be sent out to obtain a 
new supply. 

There were, at the time of my visit to Louisiana, 1,224 sugar-houses in 
operation in the State, 907 of which possessed steam power. The number of 
large plantations is everywhere decreasing, while small farms take their place. 

The cooperative system, as practiced in Martinique and other colonies, has 
been adopted to some extent in the State. It separates the production of cane 
from the manufacture of sugar, the small planters taking their cane to the sugar- 
houses to be worked through on shares. This is much better than the old 
system, which made the raising of sugar by free labor so expensive as to be 
almost impossible. The cooperative system will, perhaps, prevail very largely 
ere long, many extensive planters giving it their sanction. In 1871, there 
was enough labor and capital expended on the crop to have brought it up to a 
quarter of a million hogsheads. 

The accumulated losses of the last three years have made the trade so 
dubious that dozens of the largest planters in the State cannot secure a cent of 
advances. Plantations are deserted ; owners are completely discouraged. The 
present sugar production of this most fertile of cane- growing lands is only two 
per cent, of the whole production of the world. The consumption of sugars in 
the United States for the calendar year 1871 was 663,000 tons, of which eighty- 
five per cent, was foreign. The whole number of acres now devoted to the 
cultivation of sugar in Louisiana is estimated at 148,840, producing to the 
acre about 49,000 pounds of cane, or 1,500 pounds of raw sugar. To every 
thousand pounds of sugar there is also a yield of 666 pounds of molasses. 

All the land comprised in the section known as the "Delta proper of the Miss- 
issippi River," embracing eighteen parishes and an area of 12,000 square miles, 
is peculiarly adapted to the cultivation of sugar-cane, as well as of cotton, corn, 
rice, tobacco, indigo, oranges, lemons and figs. More than half of the population 
of the State is settled upon this delta ; and in 1 860, one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand slaves were held in that section, and the total estimate of taxable property 
there, including the slaves, amounted to $271,017,667, more than half of the 
State's entire valuation. It is not wonderful that stagnation has fallen upon 
this once prosperous region, since, reckoning the slaves at the average $1,000 
apiece, by their liberation alone $150,000,000 of the above valuation at once 
vanished into thin air.* 

For fifty or sixty miles below New Orleans, the narrow strip which protects 
the Mississippi channel on either side from the gulf is crowded with plantations. 
The soil there is all of recent alluvial formation, and is, consequently, extremely 

» 

*The census of 1870 gives Louisiana 732,731 population, of whom 364,210 were blacks. 
The population of New Orleans in 1870 was nearly 200,000. 



•MAGNOLIA PLANTATION. 



prolific. This section may, without the least exaggeration, be called " of the 
best land in the world." The rivers and bayous furnish fish and oysters of 
finest flavor ; the earth brings forth fruit and vegetables in tropical abundance ; 
all the conditions of life are easy ; and, in addition, there is the profitable culture 
of sugar and rice. 

The negroes themselves are making money rapidly in this section, and show 
much skill in managing their affairs. In many cases they were aided in purchas- 
ing their lands by. their old masters, and generally go to them for advice as to 
speculation and conduct in crop raising. The same negro who will bitterly 
oppose his old master politically, will implicitly follow his advice in matters of 
labor and investment in which he is personally concerned. 

At every turn, and" on every available spot along the shore, as one drifts 
slowly down the lower Mississippi, one is charmed to note the picturesque group- 
ing of sugar-houses and "quarters," the mansions surrounded by splendid groves, 
and the rich fields stretching miles away towards a dark belt of timber. 

Each plantation has its group of white buildings, gleaming in the sun ; each 
its long vistas of avenues, bordered with orange-trees ; for the orange and the 
sugar-cane are friendly neighbors. When the steamer swings around at the 
wharf of such a lordly plantation as that of the "Woodlands" of Bradish John- 
son, or that of Effingham Lawrence, the negroes come trooping out, men and 
women dancing, somersaulting, and shouting; and, if perchance there is music on 
the steamer, no power can restrain the merry antics of the African. 

The " Magnolia" plantation of Mr. Lawrence is a fair type of the larger and 
better class ; it lies low down to the river's level, and seems to court inundation. 
Stepping from the wharf, across a green lawn, the sugar-house first greets 
the eye, an immense solid building, crammed with costly machinery. Not far 
from it are the neat, white cottages occupied by the laborers ; there is the 
kitchen where the field-hands come to their meals ; there are the sheds where the 
carts are housed, and the cane is brought to be crushed ; and, ranging in front of 
a cane-field containing many hundreds of acres, is a great orange orchard, the 
branches of whose odorous trees bear literally golden fruit; for, with but little 
care, they yield their owner an annual income of $25,000. 

The massive oaks and graceful magnolias surrounding the planter's mansion 
give grateful shade ; roses and all the rarer blossoms perfume the air; the river 
current hums a gentle monotone, which, mingled with the music of the myriad 
insect life, and vaguely heard on the lawn and in the cool corridors of the house, 
seems lamenting past grandeur and prophesying of future greatness. For it was 
a grand and lordly life, that of the owner of a sugar plantation; filled with 
culture, pleasure, and the refinements of living; — but now! 

Afield, in Mr. Lawrence's plantation, and in some others, one may see the 
steam-plough at work, ripping up the rich soil. Great stationary engines pull it 
rapidly from end to end of the tracts ; and the darkies, mounted on the swiftly- 
rolling machine, skillfully guide its sharp blades and force them into the furrows. 
Ere long, doubtless, steam-ploughs will be generally introduced on Louisiana 
sugar estates. Four of these stationary engines, built at Leeds, England, and 

6 



82 



A PROMENADE IN A CANE-FIELD. 




'A cheery Chinaman.' 



.supplied with water brought from the river in mule carts, suffice to do the work 
upon the ample plantation of Mr. Lawrence. 

As to the details of plantation work, the negroes, evidently, do not attend to 
them with quite the thoroughness exacted under the rigid discipline of slavery. 
Evidences of neglect, in considerable variety, offer them- 
selves to the critical eye. Entering the sugar-house, the 
amiable planter will present you to a venerable, mahog- 
any-looking individual in garments stained with saccharine 
juices, and with a little tone of pride in his voice will 
tell you that " this is Nelson, overseer of this place, who 
has been here, man and boy, forty years, and who 
knows more about the process of sugar-making than any 
one else on the plantation." 

Nelson will, therefore, conduct you into the outer 
shed, and, while showing you the huge rollers under 
which the canes, when carted in from the fields in 
November or December, are crushed, will impress upon 
you the danger of early winter frosts which may baffle 
every hope of profit, will explain to you how difficult 
and how full of risks is the culture of the juicy reed, 
which must be nursed through twelve or thirteen weary months, and may leave 
but a meagre result. He will take you across the delightfully-shaded way into 
one of the fields, passing on the walk a cheery Chinaman wearing a smile 
which is seven times childlike and bland, and point you to the stalks of the 
cane left at the last harvest to lie all winter in the furrows and furnish young 
sprouts for the spring. These shapely and rich-colored stalks have joints 
every few inches along their whole length, from which spring out the new buds 
of promise. When the spring ploughing begins, these stalks are laid along the 
beds of the drills, and each shoot, as it makes its appearance, is carefully 
watched and cultured that it may produce a new cane, a great portion of the 
crop being thus reserved, each year, for seed. 

The complaisant overseer will give you a profusion of details as to how the 
cane, if safe from the accidents of the seasons, is cut down at its perfection and 
brought to the sugar-house ; how all hands, black and white, join, for many 
days, in "hauling" it from the fields, and then keep the mill going for a week 
night and day; how there is high wassail and good cheer in the intervals of 
the work, and every nerve is strained to the utmost for the completion of the 
task. He will show you the great crushers which bring the sweetness out of 
the fresh canes as they are carried forward upon an endless series of rollers, 
and will then point out the furnace into which the refuse is thrown to be burned, 
thus furnishing the motive power for crushing the stalks and for all the minor 
and subordinate mechanical details in the processes of the manufacture. The 
baggasse, as this refuse is called, usually furnishes steam enough for this purpose, 
and leaves nothing but a kind of coke in the ash-pit of the furnace; no coal 
being used except in the refining mill's furnace. 



IN THE SUGAR-HOUSE. 



83 



Out from the crushed arteries of the cane wells a thick, impure liquid, 
which demands immediate attention to preserve it from spoiling; and then the 
clarifying process is begun and continued, by the aid of hundreds of ingenious 
mechanisms, whose names even you will not remember when Nelson takes you 
into the refinery. 

You enter a set of huge chambers, the floors of which are sticky with sugar, 
and watch the juice passing through various processes. There are the great open 
trays, traversed by copper and iron steam-pipes ; there are .the filter-pans filled 
with bone dust, from which the liquid trickles down. Now it wanders through 
separators, and then through bone dust again, onward toward granulation in 
the vacuum pans, and then into coolers, where the sugar is kept in a half 




Sugar-cane Plantation — "The cane is cut down at its perfection " [Page 82. 



liquid state by means of revolving paddles, until, finally, it comes to the vessels, 
in which, by rapid whirlings, all the molasses is thrown out; and the molasses, 
leaving the dry sugar ready for commerce, goes meandering among the pipes 
under the floors, and round and round again through the whirling machines, 
until there is no suspicion of sweetness in it, and it is ignominiously discharged. 

It seems a pity that such fine machinery should be in use only during one- 
sixth of the year, as it would be injured far less by being kept constantly run- 
ning than by remaining idle. The new steam-mills are, in every point of view, 
so vastly superior to the old horse-mills, that they have been adopted on the 
greater portion of the sugar plantations, and are desired by every planter; but 



84 THE RED RIVER PARISHES SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA. 

they are so enormously expensive, that cooperative or joint ownership is, in 
many cases, essential. 

The division of the large plantations into small farms seems, sooner or later, 
inevitable; as no one owner can, under the new condition of things, make the 
necessary and continuous outlay. In a few years the cane now crushed at one 
of these immense sugar-houses in the winter months will belong, in small lots, to 
a hundred different men, instead of to the one aristocratic and wealthy planter, 
as under the old regime. 

There is not a parish in Louisiana which does not offer powerful inducements 
to immigration ; not one which will not most bitterly need it if the present 
political condition, which is driving the original inhabitants from their homes, is 
continued. Closely following upon the bloodshed in Grant parish, came a hurried, 
voluminous emigration of its citizens to Texas. They flocked to the new Eden 
in the greatest terror, seeming eager to leave their homes forever behind them. 
Still, these troubles must some day have an end, because, save in the final 
disruption of the world, there is no end to the fairy beauty and fertility of 
the bayou lands, or to the luxuriant vegetation of the vast plains. 

The parishes bordering on the Red river are especially adapted to the 
staples — sugar, cotton, wheat, corn, rye and oats — and are always accessible, the 
river in their vicinity remaining navigable at all seasons of the year. These 
parishes, six in number, comprise more than 8,500 square miles of rich alluvial 
land, and some of the largest towns are situated in them. Shreveport, on the 
west bank of the river, is the second city in the State. It is now the great centre 
of emigration into Eastern and Northern Texas, and a line of railway is projected 
to it from Vicksburg, which will give it increased commercial importance. 

In the parishes which comprise South-western Louisiana, there are more than 
3,000,000 acres of land of almost inexhaustible fertility. The forests are com- 
posed of oak, ash, locust, pine, gum, maple, cypress, elm, willow, hickory, pecan, 
persimmon, dogwood, mulberry, and magnolia trees. The giant cypresses along 
the lakes and bayous are abundant enough to last for a century. Employment 
to hundreds of mills and thousands of workmen could readily be furnished, 
the lumber being easily floated down the innumerable bayous and along the 
lakes to market. 

By the borders of the great desolate sea- marshes of St. Mary and Iberia 
runs a grand belt of timber from one to two miles wide. A western editor once 
said that if the Teche lands of Louisiana were in Illinois, they would bring from 
$300 to $500 per acre. And they could be made worth that sum in their 
present situation in five years from this writing by the introduction of intelligent 
and laborious immigrants, and by the amplification of the State's railway system. 
The " Attakapas" region, as the five parishes or counties of St. Mary, Iberia, 
Vermilion, St. Martin and Lafayette were originally called, from the name of a 
tribe of Indians, is certainly seductive enough to tempt the most fastidious. 

The cattle- grazing regions are as extensive as remarkable. There are seven 
great prairies, respectively named Grand Choiseuil, Attakapas, Opelousas, Grand 
Prairie, Prairie Mamon, Calcasieu, and Aubine, all covered with rich pasturage. 



CATTLE-RAISING — THE TECHE COUNTRY. 85 

Thousands of cattle roam over these prairies; the population is pastoral and 
to a certain extent uncultivated. There are Frenchmen and Frenchwomen 
among them who are as remote from any active participation in the politics of 
the State or the country at large, as if they lived in France. Cattle and horses 
subsist even in the marshes, and graze the year round upon a treacherous 
surface, in which such animals, bred on solider ground, will instantly sink and 
flounder. I am not willing to vouch for the Louisiana statement that these 
marsh-bred cattle and horses are web-footed, though such is the affirmation. 
One informant assured me that a proper system of transportation from 
the marshes to New Orleans would develop this now almost useless section 
immensely. Thousands of cattle might be turned in to grow fat and bide the 
time when their owners should seek them for the New Orleans market. They 
would not even need a cowherd's care. 

All the prairies in Western Louisiana are perennially green ; and upon them 
were once located the largest vacheries in the United States — vacheries whose 
owners sometimes branded five thousand calves apiece yearly. Sheep by 
thousands were also raised, but both these important industries seem to 
have largely fallen off since the war. The French paid great attention to 
the cattle and sheep husbandry in this section of Louisiana early in the last 
century, and it has been estimated by a competent authority that, allowing 
one animal to every five acres, more than 220,000 cattle could be annually 
reared and transported from the single prairie of Opelousas — a vast expanse 
of natural meadow. It was not uncommon for a stock raiser to possess from 
30,000 to 40,000 head of cattle, and twenty- five years before the war, the stock 
raisers of one parish in that section owned 100,000 cattle and 30,000 horses. 

There is no good reason why Louisiana should not be known in future as 
an extensive a cattle-raising State as her neighbor, Texas. She has nothing 
to fear from the dangers incurred by proximity to a foreign frontier, and there 
are no Indians to manifest their unconquerable longing for " raids." 

But if you wish once again to find the lost gate of Eden, if you wish 
to gain the promised land, if you wish to see in this rude, practical America 
of ours an "earthly paradise," where life is good, because Nature has invested 
it with everything that is delicious and fairest ; if you wish to see plantations 
at the height of culture — lawns as fragrant, as clean-shaven, as nobly shaded 
by graceful trees as any sovereign's — seek the Teche country. It is the pearl of 
Louisiana ; it is the gem of the South. Thither, more than a century ago, when 
the cruel order of the English dispersed them from their homes, Andry and the 
exiled Acadians took their mournful way. Thither they went, threading the 
swamps and wandering up the beautiful Atchafalaya, and , her lakes, where 

"Water lilies in myriads rocked on the slight undulations 
Made by the passing oars, and, resplendent in beauty the lotus 
Lifted her golden crown above the heads of the boatmen. 
Faint was the air with the odorous breath of magnolia blossoms, 
And with the heat of noon ; and numberless sylvan islands, 
Fragrant and thickly embowered with blossoming hedges of roses, 
Near to whose shores they glided along, invited to slumber." 



86 NEW IBERIA GRAND COTE ISLAND. 

Now, as then, the traveler, pushing his way in a tiny steamer, or in a shallop 
or pirogue, can hear — 

"Far off, indistinct, as of wave or wind in the forest, 
Mixed with the whoop of the crane, and the roar of the grim alligator," 

strange sounds from the dark forests and the lonely lands. 

From Berwick's Bay, where the rich fields lie trustingly upon the water, 
and strange vines and creepers seem to caress the waves, and bid them be 
tranquil, ascend the Teche bayou, and lose yourself in the tangled network of 
lake and lakelet, plain and forest, plantation and swamp. By day you shall have 
the exquisite glory of the sun, which, gleaming on the seigniorial residences, on 
the great white sugar-houses with their tall chimneys, on the long rows of 
cabins for the laborers, on the villas peering from orange groves and bosquets of 
the mespilus, makes all doubly bright and beautiful ; and at evening the moon 
will lend her witchery to swell your surprise and admiration. 

You will drift on by superb knots of shrubbery, from which sprightly birds 
are singing madrigals ; past floating bridges and garden bowers ; past ruined 
plantations, the wrecks of the war ; past dense cypress swamps, bordered by 
picturesque groupings of oaks and ash and gum-trees ; through that fine region 
stretching from the entrance of the bayou into the parish of Iberia and the town 
of New Iberia, where the beautiful water willows and forest trees lean forward 
from the banks as if to see themselves reflected in the stream ; where the wheels 
of passing steamers rudely brush the arching foliage ; where the live oak spreads 
its ample spray over some cool dell upon whose grassy carpet grow strange 
bright-hued flowers ; and where vistas of forest glade — happy sylvan retreats — 
open as by enchantment, and moonlight makes delicious checkerwork of gleam 
and shadow. 

Below New Iberia, on Petit Anse Island, there is a salt mine sixty feet 
beneath the level of the Gulf of Mexico, and you may go down through fifty- 
eight feet of solid rock-salt, to watch the miners pick out the crystal freight 
which has proved superior to any other salt found in the Southern market. Or 
you may penetrate the romantic country near Lake Peigneur, and even hunt 
the genial comedian — the noble artist who created the role of " Rip Van 
Winkle," — in his "Orange Island" retreat. 

The richness of Louisiana may perhaps be best illustrated by this same island. 
It is one of many in the lake, rising high above it and the surrounding 
prairie. It possesses delicious lawns miles in length, sloping gently southward ; 
orange groves, which in 1868, after a neglect of ten years, produced half a mil- 
lion oranges ; bold banks and knolls with northward outlook ; and delightful sea 
breezes constantly blowing over the whole length and breadth of its lovely 
lands. On Grand Cote Island you may wander among wide fields of cotton and 
of corn, or you may climb steep hill-sides to find a lake of purest water high up 
among them, its surface covered with water lilies ; or you may sit in garden 
bowers over which the Scuppernong grape-vines run riot, and gaze out upon the 
towering magnolia, the blooming cotton and the waving cane. 



■FINE ESTATES HEALTH. 



87 



The forests in the parish of St. Martin, in the Techc valley, contain millions 
of tall, straight cypress-trees ; and beyond are stretches of ash, gum, hickory, 
black walnut, magnolia, live, white and red oaks, linn, pecan, sycamore, and 
other trees. There are also here some grand estates, notably those of General 
Declouet, Mr. Lestrapes, and Dr. Wilkins. General Declouet's mansion is a fine 
type of the old Creole house, with spacious halls and corridors, baronial dining- 
room, and portrait galleries from which look down the faces of a hundred ances- 
tors. Avenues, bordered with China-trees or with pines, lead up to it; while 
magnolias, fig-trees, and live oaks are scattered throughout the grounds. 

One finds superb forests everywhere in Louisiana. They are among the 
chief glories of the State. One may purchase, for an insignificant sum, a lovely 
natural park, with trees in it which an English duke might covet for his estate. 




"The beautiful 'City Park'" — New Orleans. 

The oaks which stud the beautiful " City Park," and the "race-course " grounds, 
in New Orleans, are exceedingly fine. City and country alike abound in the 
most delicious foliage. 

St. Mary's parish formerly contained 170 sugar plantations, scattered along 
the banks of the Teche, the Atchafalaya, and the various bayous and water- 
ways in that section. In the same parish, 13,000 slaves were owned before 
the war, and more than 100 vessels plied between Franklin (a pretty, 
cultured town, twenty miles from Brashear) and various Northern and Southern 
ports. The fertile lands readily yield a hogshead of sugar to the acre,| and 




MAP SHOWING THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE COLORED POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES. 



88 THE SALT REGION. 

the manufacture may begin early in November. Flooded rice-lands produce 
ten barrels to the acre ; unflooded, six. There are orange orchards in this 
parish producing 3,000,000 of oranges annually. Such facts are eloquent. 

Lands in certain of the parishes, not very far from towns and trade centres, 
can be generally purchased at from $3 to $15 per acre ; those more remote are 
only worth $1 or $1.50 per acre. The general health of South-western Loui- 
siana is good ; there is no greater error than the common supposition in the 
North that the lowland climate is fatal to health. There is not a heartier or 
healthier population in the Union than that of South-western Louisiana ; none 
more frank, unsuspicious and generous. Of course hostility and even ostracism, 
at the present time, are the lot of such as take sides for the Kellogg Government ; 
but for him who does not take active part, no matter what his opinions may be, 
there is never even a harsh word. The recent operations of the "White 
League " in Northern Louisiana have been prompted by the extremists of 
the Democratic party, in the vain hope of intimidating negro voters, and 
driving out "Yankees" who are settled in some of the parishes, and who vote 
the Republican ticket. The assassinations of which this League has been 
guilt)-, and the proscriptive measures which it has adopted, are condemned in 
the strongest terms by large numbers of native Conservatives in other sections 
of the State, who realize that no reform is possible on the basis of an exclusive 
white man's government, and who appreciate the immense harm done the 
material interests of the commonwealth by a revival of the old Ku-Klux tactics 
which once disgraced the State. • 

Louisiana has some few valuable minerals, and the discovery of rock-salt in 
Vermilion parish, and of crystalline sulphur on the Calcasieu river, has encour- 
aged a search for others. Iron is scattered at various depths below the surface 
of the State south of Red river, and in some of the parishes it is so abundant as 
to obstruct the ploughs or the hoes of the farmers. Valuable deposits of organ- 
ized peat are found in many places near the coast, and the investment of a little 
capital might soon develop a great industry in the preparation of this important 
fuel. Coal abounds in certain regions through which railway lines are already 
projected, and the petroleum wells in Bossier, Bienville, and Natcnitoches 
parishes, as well as in a broad belt extending nearly to the Gulf in Calcasieu 
parish, promise a remarkable development. The salt region runs through five 
islands, ranged along the coast for about twenty miles west of the mouth of 
the Atchafalaya. One of these islands is 140 feet above the sea-level. 



VIII. 

THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN LOUISIANA. 

THE testimony of most of the planters in Louisiana, as elsewhere throughout 
the South, is that the free negro works well, and earns his wages, save 
when he is distracted by politics. Indeed, there are none who are willing to 
assert that free labor has not been a success ; and the majority would prefer it 
to the most arbitrary days of ownership, if the State were otherwise in a settled 
condition. 

It is, nevertheless, evident that political excitements, gotten up by adven- 
turers with the hope of obtaining power, take the negro's attention altogether 
too much from his work, and constitute a species of mild intellectual dissipation, 
which he thinks it vastly fine to indulge in, but which only unfits him for serious 
efforts at progress, and factitiously elevates him to a position directly opposed to 
the interests of his fellow-citizens. 

Judging from conversations with great numbers of persons, there is not 
much hope that the equality of races will be at present recognized by the 
white man in Louisiana. He will not admit that the negro is at all competent to 
legislate for him, or to vote with him on matters of common importance to 
white and black. 

While he has no desire to see any of the conditions of that kind of society 
which prevailed before the war re-established, he refuses to recognize or acqui- 
esce in the actual condition. Having been, as he considers, doomed by the 
revolution, he sits haughtily tranquil, wrapped in reserve, save when he ventures 
to predict the downfall of the Republic, and to lament the despotism under 
which he asserts that he is kept. He is fond of gloomy horoscopes, and delights 
in announcing to the world that the precedent established in Louisiana by the 
Lynch returning-board and the Durell decision will yet be disastrous to New 
York and Massachusetts. 

He is not more glad to be rid of slavery than he would be to see the last 
negro vanish from the soil. He is weary of the whole subject of politics ; 
anxious for immigration, yet doubtful of its practical results; willing to guarantee, 
to the extent allowed by his impaired fortunes, any reasonable enterprise tending 
toward the commercial development of the State, but discouraged, and often- 
times distracted. 

Impulsive, intensely individual, and extremely sensitive, he fancies that he sees 
fresh humiliations in the thousand changes which are but the inevitable attendants 
of the revolution. In the parishes, the tyranny of those who use the new political 
element for base purposes is constantly increasing in boldness and violence — now 



90 POLITICAL TROUBLES — RECONSTRUCTION MEASURES. 

showing itself in an appetite for public plunder, and now in shielding from richly 
merited punishment some infamous scoundrel. 

Sometimes the negro, annoyed and perplexed, takes the reins into his own 
hands, and then follow scenes of bloodshed and violence ; then comes to the 
front the question of black versus white, and the commonwealth is, as nearly 
always when the Legislature is in session, convulsed to its centre. Meantime 
professional politicians and lobbyists constantly arrange new plans for the pacifi- 
cation of parties, for compromises never to be effected, and victories never to 
be won. 

The citizens are willing and anxious to work, but all their energy, all the 
intense commercial ambition of New Orleans is neutralized by the incubus of a 
legislature which in no wise properly represents the people. The negro afield, 
with his sturdy family around him, cultivating the little plot which has at last 
become his, and the white man, with his own hand to the plough, showing that 
he no longer thinks labor degrading, are, to be sure, gratifying sights, which 
present themselves from time to time ; but they are by no means so common 
as they would be if the State were not constantly anguish- stricken, overwhelmed 
with taxation and myriad debts, and hindered from making the improvements 
necessary to the securing of new trade and consequent prosperity. 

There are in Louisiana men of brilliant and imposing eloquence ; men of 
entrain and magnetism, who seem fashioned for leadership ; and yet, strange as 
it may appear, who take but little interest in the affairs of their own State ; who 
either content themselves with deriding their inferiors, or with watching chances 
for personal elevation by taking advantage of the weakness or insincerity of 
those in power. They laugh at the discomfiture of their fellows, while the house 
is being pulled down over their own heads. With anarchy at their doors, they 
refuse to take the first step toward reconciliation, or a proper understanding 
between the races now so equally divided as to numbers within the State 
limits. 

In 1864 Michael Hahn was chosen first free State Governor of Louisiana. 
On the occasion of his inauguration, the celebrated Gilmore, then a band director 
in the Federal army, gave his first mammoth jubilee. Cannon roared, drums 
rolled, the earth shook. A constitutional convention was next held, and a 
constitution prohibiting slavery was a few months later adopted by the Recon- 
struction party. In 1865 Henry C. Warmoth was elected a delegate from the 
''territory" of Louisiana to the National Congress. The negroes placed him in 
office, and supplied him with funds. Under Banks, he had been provost judge 
of the parish of Orleans, and there had acquired influence over, and the confi- 
dence of, the colored voters. 

In the fall of 1865 the first general election under the new State constitution 
was held, and the Democrats were overwhelmingly successful in all sections. 
They elected J. Madison Wells Governor, and at the first session of their Legis- 
lature passed several bills which placed them in direct antagonism with the 
colored people. Among the measures instrumental in bringing on a conflict of 
races was a bill for the regulation of labor, which the negroes bitterly opposed. 



NEGRO LEGISLATION THE KELLOGG PARTY. 91 

In 1866 a new constitutional convention was held, the members of the Radical 
party desiring to check the Democratic successes by remodeling the constitution. 
Riots occurred, in which white and black men lost their lives. This led to the 
appointment of a special committee of investigation by Congress, and to the 
inauguration of the policy of reconstruction. 

In the fall of 1867 another convention met, which had been provided for by 
the Reconstruction Act, and in May of 1868 a thoroughly radical constitution 
was adopted, Henry C. Warmoth being elected Governor, and a Republican 
Legislature, of course largely composed of ignorant negroes, coming into power. 
This legislative session was occupied by petty squabbles, and by the passage of 
many bills in the interest of corrupt jobs. The Conservatives did not, how- 
ever, yield their power without some show of resistance, and the Presidential 
campaign of 1868 was the occasion of much severe fighting in the State. The 
negroes were very shamefully intimidated, and but few of them succeeded in 
casting their votes for President. 

However, the new party, composed of ignorant and immoral negroes, led on 
by reckless and greedy white adventurers, held Louisiana completely in its 
power, and gross frauds were perpetrated. Ignorance, captivated by the glitter 
of money, and misled by wily sharpers, thrust ruin in a hundred ways upon the 
unfortunate State. For two or three years the most scandalous plundering was 
indulged in. The Governor was himself disgusted with such manoeuvres, and 
gradually showed a leaning toward the respectable Conservatives, who now and 
then gathered around him. But the Conservatives had waited too long before 
attempting a policy of conciliation. The negroes were thoroughly estranged, 
and could not be persuaded to listen to anything which they might say. A 
division took place in the Republican party ; the Legislature became hostile to 
Governor Warmoth, and in the summer of 1871 a new convention was held in 
New Orleans. Both wings of the now divided Republican party attempted to 
obtain control of this convention, which was held in the Custom- House. The 
Federal appointees in New Orleans— Mr. Casey, the collector of the port, Mr. 
Packard, the United States Marshal, and others — refused the opposite faction 
admission to the convention, the services of a company of United States infantry 
being secured to prevent Warmoth's entrance. 

Upon this, Warmoth and his party declared war against the Federal 
appointees, held an opposition convention, and even sent a committee to Presi- 
dent Grant asking for the removal of Packard and Casey. The President 
disregarded this request, and Warmoth and his friends therefore opposed his 
re-election, Warmoth even braving the anger of the Administration by partici- 
pating in the Cincinnati "Liberal " convention of 1872. 

The division in the Republican ranks grew daily more pronounced, and when 
the time came to choose a new governor candidates were abundant. The Con- 
servatives finally united upon John McEnery ; Warmoth ran on an independent 
ticket, and the Federal, or "Custom-House " party, brought forward William Pitt 
Kellogg, the then United States Senator from the State. Mr. Kellogg had been 
collector of the port of New Orleans under President Johnson, and had acquired 



9 2 



THE FEDERAL INTERVENTION IN LOUISIANA. 






the Louisiana 
United States 
Carl Schurz 
up the whole 



some little knowledge of Louisiana politics. He was, without doubt, beaten in 
the election for governor, McEnery being unquestionably elected, although it is 
conceded on all hands that frauds were liberally practiced by both parties. 

The Conservatives, who had doubtless learned wisdom from their political 
experiences since the close of the war, were about to resume power, not a little 
glad to be freed from the contest of factions which had so long paralyzed the 
State, when their hopes were dashed by sudden Federal intervention. 

The history of the infamy which, in the name of law, was perpetrated in New 
Orleans, in December of 1872, is well known to all who have taken any interest 
in general politics. The non-elected Legislature was placed in power by Federal 
bayonets, called into requisition by an order issued by a Federal judge named 
Durell. A returning-board which had not, and did not pretend to have the elec- 
tion returns before it, yet which was the only one recognized by Judge Durell, 
who was firm in his policy of usurpation, seated the Kellogg government, and 

struck a direct blow at the will of 
the majority. It pushed Louisiana to 
the very verge of ruin. 
In his speech on 
bill, made before the 
Senate early in 1873, 
has briefly summed 
matter in the following words. 
Speaking of the Legislature mentioned 
above, he says : 

"There was, I believe, not a single 
one of them who was returned by a 
board that had the official returns of 
the election in its hands or had ever 
seen them. By virtue of what, then, 
were those men put in the Legislature ? 
Not by virtue of votes, not by virtue 
of returns, but upon the ground of newspaper reports, of wild guesses, of forged 
affidavits, of the usurpation of a Federal judge, and of Federal bayonets. 
That was their whole title to the legislative capacity which they assumed. 

"What was their first act ? They impeached the Governor. Throwing aside 
all the forms of impeachment prescribed by law, they impeached and suspended 
the Governor, if a summary decree can be called impeachment and suspension. 
They who had not a shadow of right based upon law, upon votes, upon an elec- 
tion, upon legal returns, proceeded to undo one governor and to make another. 
That second governor was Pinchback. The National Government recognized 
him as the Governor of Louisiana. 

" Then they proceeded to what they called the canvass of the votes in the 
Legislature, not canvassing legal returns of voters in any legal form, but a can- 
vass on the ground of newspaper reports, wild guesses, and forged affidavits. 
What I say here is by no means an exaggerated assertion, for it is distinctly 



The Supreme Court — New Orleans. 



THE USURPATION ITS EFFECTS. 



93 



proven by the testimony, and I think it is denied by no one. Then they 
declared the men of their choice : Kellogg, Governor ; Antoine, Lieutenant- 
Governor, and so on all the State officers of Louisiana. 

"Thus the usurpation is consummated — a usurpation without the shadow of 
a law as an excuse; with nothing but fraud and force to stand upon; a usurpa- 
tion palpable, gross, shameless, and utterly subversive of all principles of republi- 
can government ; a usurpation such as this country has never seen, and probably 
no citizen of the United States has ever dreamed of. The offspring of this Legis- 
lature is the Kellogg government." 

What has been the result of this usurpation ? The State has been broken 
down by taxation and debt; the negro has been demoralized; the principal cities 
and towns are impoverished. 

Had the usurpation been confined within bounds, the people of Louisiana 
would doubtless have borne it in silence ; but the usurping government was not 
content with ordinary measures. Possessed of arbitrary power, it proceeded to 
exercise it in the most odious fashion. Scarcely ninety days after the Durell 
decision, the judges whom, by large majorities, the people of the parish of 
Orleans had elected to preside over certain district courts, and who had been 
commissioned by Warmoth and sworn in, were unseated by force, and the can- 
didates who had been defeated were put in their places. 

This was the signal for an uprising. The incipient riot, however, was 
speedily quelled, and the natives of the State who did not propose to compro- 
mise their loyalty by a collision with the United States troops, stationed in New 
Orleans, were remanded to their condition of a subjugated class. 

Resistance to taxation, which began in 1873, was pretty effectually checked 
by the proclamation of the President, which made such resistance dangerous. 
People who wish to keep in their hands what little property now remains to 
them are compelled in one manner or another to pay up. 

New Orleans has suffered peculiarly, its taxable property being cumbered 
with two huge debts, that of the city itself, now estimated at about $22,500,000, 
and over three-fifths of the State's 



various liabilities. "While the city 
groans under such enormous taxation, 
it has been loaded down with grievous 
licenses on all trades, professions, and 
occupations, amounting to nearly 
$1,000,000 annually. 

Under these burdens it is not as- 
tonishing that real estate in the city 
has declined from thirty to more than 
fifty per cent. The double public debt 
of the city is already more than one- 
fourth of its property assessment, and 
many times more than the value of all 
the available property now owned by 




The United States Barracks— New Orleans. 



94 MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS IN NEW ORLEANS. 

the corporation. The annual expenditures of the city were increased from 
$3,767,000 in 1862, to $6,961,381 in 1872; and still mount upward. Mean- 
time the streets remain uncared for, and the treasury is empty. Where has 
the money gone ? 

The city certificates are sold on the street at enormous discounts ; the Legis- 
lature's sessions cost the people half a million dollars yearly, instead of $100,000 
as in i860, and this also the city is compelled mainly to pay; whoever, therefore, 
buys property in the city of New Orleans buys with it a share of a great and 
discouraging public debt. 

There is some hope, however, at present, for the administration of the 
metropolis. The economy inaugurated in 1873 will be but of small avail for 
a year or two, for the sums expended around the City Hall in New Orleans 
were so enormous that gradual reduction will not relieve the people much. 
The budget of 1872 provided for the payment of the sum of $229,000 to the 
various employes about the City Hall, or more than is annually paid to the 
President, Vice-President, judges of the Supreme Court, and cabinet officers of 
the United States, and the State officers of Louisiana. There was a veritable 
army of office-holders and dependents about the municipal head-quarters. 

The government of the city is now entirely vested in a mayor, and seven 
" administrators," respectively charged with the administration of finance, com- 
merce, improvements, assessments, police, public accounts, and water works and 
public buildings. These eight gentlemen constitute what is known as the City 
Council, and are elected biennially at the time of the election for members of the 
General Assembly. 

The famous Board of Metropolitan Police, created by Warmoth, is in no man- 
ner under the direction of the City Council, the administrator of the police 
department being merely an ex-officio member of that board. The Metropolitan 
Police constitute a body directed by a board controlled by the State Executive, 
and which is paid by taxes levied upon the city. It is in reality an armed mili- 
tary force which the central State Government maintains in the capital for the 
enforcement of its measures and the prevention of riots. Since Warmoth created 
it, its cost has been enormous, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars 
yearly. The police expenses for the year ending October 1st, 1869, were 
$930,809.09; for 1870, $725,357.73; and for 1871, about $800,000. The 
municipality constantly threatens rebellion against the control of its action by 
State interference, but, meantime, that control increases in strength and 
extent. 

The speculation, in warrants, the creation of certain courts out of elements 
diametrically opposed to the real interests of the people of the State, are evils 
which are even worse than they have been represented by the injured, and for 
which there is no excuse. The Federal Government may and should protect the 
freedman in the rights given him by the revolution consequent on the war; but it 
should not permit the use of ignorant masses of negroes as stepping-stones to 
tyrannical, centralized power ; it should not allow interlopers to array the black 
freedman against the white freeman, under any pretense whatsoever. 



THE STATE FINANCES THE NEGRO LEGISLATURE. 



95 



To give an account of the condition of the State finances is somewhat difficult. 
It was stated, in 1872, that the amount of the actual funded and unfunded debt 
was between $24,000,000 and $25,000,000; that the contingent liabilities 
amounted to $5,483,602; and that the amount of bonds "authorized" by the 
Legislature, but not yet issued, was $10,770,000, making a total of actual, contin- 
gent, and prospective liability which is far from cheering, especially as from 
i860 to 1 87 1 the valuation of property in the State decreased from $435,000,000 
to $250,000,000. 

With the possibility of a war of races constantly thrusting forward its ugly 
head, it is easy to perceive how industrial development is hindered and capital 
frightened away ; it is easy to see how passions which should long since have 
become extinct still smoulder, and are ready at a moment's warning to burst 
forth into anarchy and chaos. 

It is now and then asserted that corruption, consequent upon despair and dis- 
gust, has affected the ranks of the native born citizens ; and that there have been 
cases where even they have crowded the lobbies of the hybrid legislature 
in the interests of corporations. This seems hardly credible, when it is 
remembered that the masses of the conservative citizens vehemently assert that 
the returning-board which established that legislature in power had no official 
statements in its possession on which to base its conclusion, and since they are 
supported in their assertion by the declaration of a Committee of the United 
States Senate that the Lynch returning-board's canvass " had no semblance of 
integrity." 

A visit to Mechanics' Institute, the seat of the Kellogg Legislature, during 
the session, is a curious experience. At the doors stand negro policemen, armed 
with clubs and revolvers ; and crowds of blacks obstruct the passage-ways. 
Mounting: a staircase covered with 



old, tobacco stained matting, one 
finds himself in the House of Repre- 
sentatives, where sit the law- makers 
with their feet upon their desks. 
Nearly all the honorable members 
are black ; some of them are so 
completely ignorant that they cannot 
follow the course of debate. But all 
are so drilled by the adventurers 
who control them that their oppo- 
sition to anything likely to better 
the present horrible political condi- 
tion is firm and determined. There 
are also many blacks in the Senate. 
When a colored man is in the chair, 
he is always falling into profound 
errors with regard to his rulings and 
decisions. He finds it difficult to 




Mechanics' Institute — New Orleans. 



g6 THE DECLINE OF REAL ESTATE. 

follow the course of any bill the moment half-a-dozen members are speaking of 
it, and constantly submits to corrections and suggestions from some lean white 
man, dressed in new clothes, who smiles contemptuously, as, from a carpet-bag 
point of view, he superintends this legislative farce. And this scene has been 
enacted for six weary years — the State meantime sinking deeper and deeper into 
the abyss of crushing taxation. It is not wonderful that "White Leagues," in 
opposition to negro government, are springing up throughout Louisiana. 

Here are some instances which will show how greatly property has decreased 
in value under the present crushing taxation and wholesale plundering. 

A gentleman in New Orleans was, some time since, offered a loan of $6,000 
on the security of certain real estate owned by him. He did not then need the 
money ; but recently went to the capitalist and said, " I will now accept your 
kind offer." Said the capitalist, " I would not now lend you $600 on the 
property. It is worth nothing as security. No property in the city, in the 
current condition of politics, is worth anything." 

A gentle nan who purchased, a short time before the war, a finely wooded 
estate in a rich section of Louisiana, for $100 in gold per acre, informed me that 
he had tried repeatedly to borrow upon the security of that estate, and that he 
could not get any one to lend a sum equivalent to one dollar per acre on it. 

Some three years ago a prominent capitalist was addressed by a citizen of 
Louisiana, who represented that a great many rich estates could be purchased in 
various sections of the commonwealth for at least one-third of their original 
value ; and added, as an inducement to speedy decision, that he did not think 
property would ever be lower in Louisiana. The capitalist replied that he 
differed with his much esteemed friend ; that in a few years those estates would, 
by the various derangements consequent on the then predominant legislation, be 
reduced to almost no value whatever, and that he was therefore determined 
to wait. 

During a visit to New Orleans, in March of 1874, my attention was called to 
a number of notable instances of the rapid decline of property. One gentleman 
pointed out a house which, in 1868, he would have been glad to purchase for 
$12,000; a little later it was sold for $8,000; then for $6,000, and now no 
one could be found to take it at $4,000. Many houses are given rent free to 
persons who will occupy them, that they may not be allowed to fall into decay. 

The sheriff is the prosperous man in New Orleans. His office has been 
made worth $60,000 yearly. 

The annual session of the Legislature, fortunately limited by the Constitution 
to sixty days, is a terrible trial. The state government cannot be depended 
upon. Earnest men, on the conservative side, are deterred from conciliatory 
action by the insincerity of those in power. At one time the dominant party 
seemed really desirous of inaugurating reform in the management of certain 
affairs, and called for a committee of investigation to be composed of the prop- 
erty-holders. But as, at nearly the same time, it voted away $500,000 worth 
of State bonds for a doubtful enterprise, the property-holders could not be made 
to believe that there was, in truth, any desire for " retrenchment" and " reform." 



EDUCATION IN LOUISIANA. 97 

Time and time again the legislature which the Federal Government placed in 
power in Louisiana has sworn in as members men whom the returning-boards 
did not even pretend had been elected ; and these men have been allowed to sit 
as representatives of people whom they have never seen. 

One of the worst features of the situation in Louisiana is the entire absence 
of the intelligent and well-to-do negroes from politics there. It is only the ras- 
cals and the dubious who get into power; and they are more terrible than the 
white rogues. They practice all the vices in the calendar; they take the thou- 
sands of dollars diverted from their proper channels, and lavish them upon 
abandoned white women ; they enrich themselves and boast of it. 

The present condition of the educational system of Louisiana is encouraging, 
although disfigured by evils which arise from the political disorganization. The 
State superintendent of education, at the time of my visit, was a mulatto gentle- 
man of evident culture — seeming, indeed, quite up to the measure of his task, if 
he only had the means to perform it. He could not tell me how many schools 
were in operation in the State; nor how much the increase had been since 
the war. There was, he explained, the greatest difficulty in procuring returns 
from the interior districts, even the annual reports being forwarded tardily, or 
sometimes not at all. The school-tax has heretofore been two mills on the dollar, 
but it is to be raised to one-fourth of one per cent. The State is in six divisions, 
one of which comprises New Orleans, and there is a superintendent for each 
division. 

There are now in Louisiana 291,000 youth between the ages of six and 
twenty-one ; and it is fair to presume that at least one-half of them are children 
of colored parents, since the population of Louisiana is pretty equally divided into 
white and black. The Legislature appropriates half a million dollars yearly for 
the use of th,e schools, of which about seven- eighths is annually expended. 
There are a few mixed schools now in the State, although the mingling of colors 
has not been insisted upon. 

Great numbers of private schools have sprung into existence, especially in 
New Orleans, where the predominant religion is the Catholic ; and the Germans 
have shown their fear of mixed schools by establishing special schools for their 
own children. The Catholic clergy in New Orleans have not gone so far as to 
forbid the attendance of children of Catholic parents in the public schools ; but 
the organ of that clergy announced, some time since, that the poverty, and not 
the will of the parties, acceded the permission to attend secular schools. Im- 
mense progress has certainly been made since the war. In 1868, when the real 
work of school reform in the State began, there was no supervision whatever exer- 
cised over school funds, and millions of dollars were uselessly squandered. There 
were then less than one hundred public schools ' in the entire State. But it was 
estimated at the first educational convention ever held in Louisiana, which met in 
New Orleans, in 1872, that there were at that time 1,100 schools in operation, 
with nearly 100,000 pupils. The old system, or lack of system, had had most 
painful results. There were no means of obtaining proper reports ; there was no 
certainty that the few teachers who were employed did their duty. 



98 THE SCHOOL-LAW THE STATE UNIVERSITY. 

The present school- law is well adapted to the condition and wants of the 
State. There is one ugly fact in the way of progress in the interior of the 
commonwealth, and that is, as asserted by the superior officials, that the money 
appropriated to the different parishes for school funds, has, in many cases, 
never been used for schools ; and prosecution of officers supposed to have 
retained that money is of but small avail. There are ostensibly parish boards 
of school directors in office in every section of the State; but they do not all 
perform their duty. 

The school-law provides for tne maintenance of a proper normal depart- 
ment; and good teachers are yearly sent out therefrom. New Orleans now has 
about seventy public schools, and a little more than $700,000 invested in school 
property. The teachers in those schools exclusively attended by white children 
are all white ; in the few mixed schools there are some colored teachers. The 
superintendent said that it would not do to insist upon mixed schools in remote 
districts, as the people would in that case refuse to have any school at all. 

The Louisiana State University, temporarily located at Baton Rouge until its 
new buildings at Alexandria are completed, is a struggling institution, which 
needs and merits much aid from richer States ; and an agricultural college and 
a system of industrial schools have been projected. The colored children in the 
public schools manifest an earnestness and aptitude which amply demonstrates 
their claim to be admitted to them. People in all sections have ceased grumbling 
at the " school-house taxes," and that in itself is a cheering sign. 



IX. 



"HO FOR TEXAS!" GALVESTON. 



ONE of the saddest sights in New Orleans or Galveston is the daily arrival 
of hundreds of refugees from the older Southern States, seeking homes 
on the Texan prairies. The flood of emigration from South Carolina, Alabama 
and Georgia is formidable, and turned the tide of politics in Texas, in a single 




year, from Republi- 
can flood tO DemO- 
Going to Texas, cratic ebb. Old 
men and little children, youths and 
maidens, clad in homespun, crowd 
the railway cars, looking forward 
eagerly to the land of promise. The ignorance of these poor people with 
regard to the geography of the country in general, is dense. " I never 
traveled so much befo'," is a common phrase; "is Texas a mighty long ways 
off yet ?" The old men, if one enters into conversation with them, will regale 
him with accounts of life in their homes "befo' the surrender." With them, 



IOO THE ROUTE FROM NEW ORLEANS TO TEXAS. 

everything dates from the war, leaving the past irrevocably behind its yawning 
gulf, while in front there is only poverty — or flight. 

The route from New Orleans to Brashear City is, in the delightful months of 
April and May, one of the most beautiful in the South. The railroad which 
connects at Brashear City with the Morgan steamers sailing to Galveston, and 
along which the tide of emigration constantly flows, traverses weird forests and 
lofty cane-brakes, and passes over bayous, swamps, and long stretches of sugar 
plantations. 

Crossing the Mississippi by the great railroad ferry to Algiers, the traveler 
soon leaves behind the low, green banks, studded with neat, white houses embow- 
ered in a profusion of orange groves ; and is borne out of sight of the black 
lines of smoke left upon the cloudless sky by the funnels of the river steamers. 
He passes Bayou des Allemands, and a low country filled with deep, black pools ; 
hurries across the reedy and saturated expanse of Trembling Prairie, dotted 
with fine oaks ; rattles by Raceland, and its moist, black fields, to La Fourche 
Bayou, on which lies the pretty, cultivated town of Thibodeaux. 

He next passes Chacahoula swamp, a wilderness of shriveled cypresses and 
stagnant water ; Tigerville, with its Indian mounds ; the rich Bceuf country, 
along the banks of whose lovely bayou lie wonderful sugar lands, once crowded 
with prosperous planters, but now showing many an idle plantation. He passes 
immense groves, from the boughs of whose trees thousands of Spanish* moss 
beards are pendent; and through which long and sombre aisles, like those of a 
cathedral, open to right and left. He wonders at the presence of the bearded 
moss on all the trees, and his commercial eye perhaps suggests that it be made 
available in upholstery ; but he is told that the quaint parasite already does good 
service as the scavenger of the air. 

At Brashear City he finds a steamer for Texas at the fine docks built by the 
enterprising proprietor of the " Morgan line," and notes, as he passes out to the 
blue waters of the Gulf, the richness of the vegetation along the shores of the 
inlet. An afternoon and a night — and he is in Galveston. 

The coast line of Texas, bordering upon the Gulf of Mexico from Sabine 
Pass to the Rio Grande, — from the Louisiana boundary to the hybrid, pictur- 
esque territory where the American and Mexican civilizations meet and conflict, 
is richly indented and studded with charming bays. Trinity, Galveston, West, 
Matagorda, Espiritu Santu, Aransas, and Corpus Christi harbors, each and all 
offer varied possibilities for future commerce. The whole coast, extending 
several hundred miles, is also bordered by a series of islands and peninsulas, long 
and narrow in form, which protect the inner low-lying banks from the high seas. 

The plains extending back from the coast in the valleys of the Sabine, the 
San Jacinto and the Colorado, seem in past centuries to have formed a vast 
delta, whose summit was probably near the Colorado, and whose angles were 
formed by the Sabine and the Nueces. Great horizons, apparently boundless as 
the sea, characterize these plains ; the wanderer on the Gulf sees only the 
illimitable expanse of wave and alluvial ; the eye is fatigued by the immensity, 
and gladly seeks rest upon the lines of ancient forest which cover the borders 



THE MORGAN STEAMSHIP LINE GALVESTON. IOI 

of the Colorado and the Nueces. Beyond these plains comes the zone of the 
prairies, whose lightly undulating surface extends inland as far as the Red river, 
while the mountains on the north-west crown the fertile knolls of rolling country. 

These mountains are portions of the Sierra Madre, which is itself but a spur 
from the grand Andean chain. Running to the north-west in the State of 
Coahuila (once a portion of Texas), the Sierra Madre spur bifurcates to enter the 
Texas of the present, and continues in a north-westerly direction, under the 
name of the San Saba, in whose breasts are locked the rich minerals which the 
Spaniard, during his period of domination, so often and so vainly ,strove to 
unearth. 

The Texan coast sweeps downward and outward by a wide curve to the 
Mexican boundary. Approaching it from the sea, the eye encounters only a 
low-lying level of white sand, with which, however, at all hours, the deep colors 
of the gulf are admirably contrasted. 

The great sea highway to which I have previously alluded, from Brashear 
City, on Berwick's Bay, on the Louisiana coast, to Galveston, is well known and 
fascinating to the modern traveler. The enterprise and liberal expenditure 
of a citizen of New York, Mr. Charles Morgan, has covered the waves of this 
route with steamships, which, until recently, furnished the only means of com- 
munication between Texas and the rest of the United States. The Morgan Line 
was not merely the outgrowth of an earnest demand ; it was the work of an 
adventurous pioneer ; and although its importance, in view of the grand railroad 
development of Northern Texas, can henceforth be but secondary, its founder 
will always be remembered for his foresight and daring. The improvements in 
the channels from Berwick's Bay outward are also the work of the owner of this 
line. They comprehend the dredging of a great bar which once obstructed the 
short passage to the Gulf, and when completed will be of infinite importance to 
the commerce of the whole south-west. Thousands of tons of shells have been 
dragged out of the dark-blue water to make room for the prows of the Morgan 
fleet, pointed toward Galveston and Indianola. 

And what is Galveston ? A thriving city set down upon a brave little island 
which has fought its way out of the depths of the Gulf, and given to the United 
States her noblest beach, and to Texas an excellent harbor. Seen from the sea, 
when approaching under the fervid light of a Southern dawn, or when sailing 
away from it ^n the white moonlight, so intensely reflected on the sand, it is 
indeed a place where 

" Myrtle groves 
Shower down their fragrant wealth upon the waves 
Whose long, long swell mirrors the dark-green glow 
Of cedars and the snow of jasmine cups." 

It is a city in the sands ; yet orange and myrtle, oleander and delicate rose, 
and all the rich-hued blossoms of a tropic land, shower their wealth about it. In 
the morning the air is heavy with the perfume of blossoms ; in the evening the 
light, to Northern eyes, is intense and enchanting. 



102 



THE BEACH GALVESTON ISLAND. 



Thirty-one miles of picturesque beach are constantly laved by the restless 
waters. It is only a few steps from an oleander grove to the surf, the shell- 
strewn strand, and the dunes. The approach from the mainland will instinctively 
remind the traveler of Venice. A great bridge, two miles in length, connects 

the islet with the 
continent. Dis- 
mantled fortifica- 
tions near the 
bridge show one 
that the war 
reached even to 
the Gulf; and the 
mass of low- 
lying, white, bal- 
conied houses 
forms a pleasant 
group. 

Much of the 
island is unkempt 
and neglected- 
looking. Cattle 
wander freely 




"It is only a few stefis from an oleander grove to the surf." 



about. There are a few market-gardens, and some meat-packeries in the 
suburbs of the city. Galveston itself, however, is as trim and elegant as any 
town in the South. The business quarter looks quaint and odd to strangers' 
eyes, because of the many long piers and jetties; the mule-carts, unloading 
schooners anchored lightly in the shallow waves ; and the hosts of slouch- 
ing darkies, shouting and dancing as they move about their tasks. 

The " Strand," the main business thoroughfare, has been twice ruined by fire, 
but has sprung up again into quite a magnificence of shop and warehouse ; and 
Tremont, and other of the commercial avenues, boast of as substantial structures 
as grace the elder Northern cities. There is a network of wharves and ware- 
houses, built boldly out into the water, in a manner which recalls Venice even 
more forcibly than does the approach from the mainland. 

The heat is never disagreeably intense in Galveston ; a cocj breeze blows 
over the island night and day ; and the occasional advent of the yellow-fever, — 
the dread intruder who mows down hundreds of victims, — is a mystery. It 
comes, apparently, upon the wings of the very wind which puts health and life 
into every vein ; and many a midsummer is rendered memorable by its 
ravages. 

Yet there could hardly be imagined a more delightful water- side resort than 
Galveston, during, at least, four months in the year. My first visit to the beach 
was in February, and the air of Northern June fanned the waves. The winter 
months could certainly be delightfully spent in Galveston ; and the little city has 
built a splendid hotel as a seductive bait for travelers. 



THE HISTORY OF GALVESTON. 



IO- 



Galveston is memorable in Texan history as the retreat of the dread pirates 
of the Gulf — the smugglers and outlaws of Barataria. Though discovered in 
1686 by La Salle, it remained uninhabited until 18 16, when Lafitte and his pirate 
brethren from the Louisiana coast tested the capacities of the harbor, and shortly 
after it was occupied by the forces of the " Mexican Republic." Privateers 
went out from the bay to cruise against Spanish commerce, and the fleets of 
Spain were swept from the Gulf. 

The island also became a depot for the sale of negroes, to be imported into 
Louisiana, the native African's market value being one dollar per pound. At 
one time the followers of " Lafitte, the Galveston buccaneer," numbered a thou- 
sand refugees from justice. , Lafitte was appointed " governor of the island " by 
the Mexican authorities, who cared little for the character of their public servants, 
provided they were efficient. 

But in due time the prince of pirates was compelled by the Government of 
the United States to leave Galveston forever, as his followers had so far forgotten 
themselves as to plunder American shipping. The island again became a waste, 
and only an occasional superstitious hunter for the spoils of the pirates visited 
the sandy shores. 

As the republic of Texas grew in after years, however, so grew Galveston. 
It was a promising town before the late war, with perhaps ten thousand popula- 
tion. While the rude interior towns were still in their infancy, Galveston was a 
port of entry, the station of the navies of the little republic, and the scene of 
many courtly festivities in honor of foreign ambassadors. 

During the war its commerce was, of course, utterly broken, and it was occu- 
pied in turn by Union and Confederate soldiers. Latterly it has assumed a 
commercial importance which promises to make it a large and flourishing city, 




'The mule-carts, unloading schooners anchored lightly in the shallow waves." [Page 102.] 



io4 



THE TEXAS COTTON TRADE. 



although it has many rivals in the field whence it expects to draw its trade. 
The cotton factors of the city are enthusiastic in their belief that they shall 
succeed in bringing to their port the majority of the cotton grown in Texas, but 
they overlook the formidable rivalry of St. Louis. The capitalists of that city 
intend to control the whole cotton crop of Northern Texas, bringing it into their 
market over the new Cairo and Fulton line and over the railroads running 
through Central Northern Texas; and in case the New Orleans, Mobile and 
Texas railroad should connect Houston with New Orleans, Houston might take 
the remainder of the cotton crop, diverting it from the Galveston channel, and 
throwing it into the New Orleans market. Galveston has but one railroad exit, 
the line leading to Houston, where all the railroads of the grand new system 
will centre. Although the business men of Galveston are confident that the 




" Galveston has many huge cotton presses " 

cotton crop will all fall into their hands, those of Houston think differently. 
Galveston has many huge cotton presses, in whose sheds thousands of bales 
lie stored. 

It is to be hoped that such a large proportion of the twenty millions of acres 
of cotton-bearing lands in Texas will speedily come under cultivation that all the 
channels of trade will be filled to repletion. The freed negroes, who are through- 
out Texas an industrious and prosperous class, although, of course, characterized 
by the failings of their race, and the crudities consequent on their sudden change 
of station, are extensively engaged in the culture of cotton. The negro who is 
fortunate enough to have secured a tract of land, grows all the cotton he can, and 
if he would take the necessary pains to clean and prepare it, would soon enrich 
himself in the profitable culture. 



THE EXPORT OF COTTON. 



I05 



The lands at the head of Galveston Bay, and on the adjoining San Jacinto 
Bay, as well as all the lands in immediate proximity to the Gulf, are well 
adapted to the culture of sea- island cotton — equal in quality to the best grown 
upon the islands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. It would be diffi- 
cult to imagine a better paying culture than that of this excellent staple, the 
yield being from $200 to $300 in gold per acre. The alluvial lands along the 
Gulf demand the presence of the Chinaman ; great fortunes lie hidden in their flats. 

The export of sea-island cotton is trivial as yet, but growing daily. In 1870 
the exports amounted to $17,719; in 1871, to $44,863, and in 1872, to $84,437. 
Some of the exports of the ordinary upland cotton from Galveston since the war 
are shown in the appended table : 



Year. 
1866 
1867 
1868 
1869 
1870 
1871 
1872 
1873 



Bales. Dollars. 

16,417 $2, 146,224 

66,271 6,730,257 

87,794 7,687,464 

•■••••■••■ 84,485 . . . 9,997,661 

144, 123 14,476,550 

233,737 16,060,794 

186,073 ■ 1 1,898,870 

333. 5°2 32,423,806 

The commercial year begins May 1st. 



The total amount of dutiable and free imports for each year since the 
re-establishment of business, May 1st, 1866, in the Galveston Custom -House, 
until December 31st, 1872, is as follows: 1866, $366,388; in 1867, $766,622; 
in 1868, $251,052; in 1869, $276,588; in 1870, $774,918; in 1871, $1,586,408; 
and in 1872, $1,940,292. 

The number of entrances of foreign and coastwise vessels in Galveston harbor 
yearly varies from 700 to 1,400. Steamships loaded with cotton run regularly 
between Galveston and Liverpool ; ^^tf^ffiMBSS^mma^ 

and, returning, bring out English, -^ " 

Irish, and Scotch emigrants, giving .jj^^fl 
them credit for their passage-money, 
and binding them by contract to work 
for a fixed sum for a certain term after 
their arrival in Texas. This plan has 
thus far succeeded admirably, and is 
bringing hundreds of worthy families 
from the slums of English cities into 
the inspiring atmosphere of the Texan 
uplands. The main shipments of 
cotton are, of course, to Liverpool 
although London, Bremen, and Ham- 
burg receive some of the crop. 

There are now fifteen steamers run- 
ning tO Berwick's Bay; eight tO New The Custom- House 



\.r -- 




io6 



COASTWISE AND FOREIGN TRADE 



York ; a line to Baltimore ; bayou steamers to Houston, and river steamers from 
the Trinity and the Brazos. The steamship line between New York and Gal- 
veston carries about ninety-five per cent, of all the merchandise sent into Texas 
from New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore. The foreign trade of the 




T--MI 







Primitive enough is this Texan jail." [Page 107.] 




port is increasing with wonderful rapidity; tallow and cotton-seed oil-cake are 
important exports ; and on my second visit to Galveston I saw the famous 
steamer " Hornet" loading with cattle for Havana. It is proposed to supply the 
West Indian market 'hereafter entirely with Texan cattle, the transit requiring 
only three days ; and there are large exports of hides and wool. 

The imports are salt, coffee, crockery, iron and tin, and best of all — though 
non-dutiable — a steady current of sturdy Germans, who tame the wildness of 
Texas faster than the natives themselves can do it. Galveston is likely to remain 
the best coffee market in the United States. The importation of lumber from 
Florida, Louisiana, and Northern ports, employs a large number of vessels yearly, 
for Galveston stands in a timberless region ; there is not an acre of forest land for 
miles on miles around. 

Thus much for the present commerce of Galveston ; its future would be per- 
fectly certain were it not for the rivalry forced upon neighboring towns by the 
marvelously rapid development of transit lines. Very little fear have the Gal- 
vestonians, the cheery " sand-crabs," as the people of Houston affectionately 
call them, of being "left out in the cold." And they go on building superb 
new avenues, planting their oleanders, and trellising their roses, without any 
worry for the morrow. The rebound since the war has certainly been surprising. 
Galveston was almost depopulated at the close of the great struggle, hardly two 
thousand people remaining there. Let us take a picture or two from the life 
of the " Island City." 

Morning : A bright sunlight on the silver- rippling water, and one catches the 
inspiring breath of the waves. Yonder is a mass of dense foliage, from whose 



PICTURES FROM LIFE IN THE "ISLAND CITY. 



I07 



green peer out faintest red and purest white, the color of the blossoms and the 
gleam of the house-walls. Here the oleanders have arched their boughs and 
made a shaded walk ; the magnolia towers above a little balconied cottage, on 
whose gate a couple of half-naked negro children are swinging ; a mocking-bird 
is imitating the strange whir of the insect-life about him ; there is very little din 
or rattle of carriages or drays ; the town seems to have wakened lazily, and to 
be lolling in the sun-bath, and rejoicing in the hints of the 

"Salt and spume o' the sea" 

which drift lightly inland. 

At the doors of the Custom-House half-a-dozen negroes are lying with their 
heads upon the broad steps, yawning and joking ; at the long, white-painted 
market-sheds, the market-men and women have done their shouting, and relapsed 
into a kind of contented rest as they feel the day's heat coming on ; under the 
wooden awnings in the principal avenues of lighter trade a few black-robed, dark- 
eyed ladies pass quietly to and fro ; and from the sea drifts up the chant of 
dusky watermen loading their mule-carts. 

Noon: From this balcony we can overlook the jail, the cathedral, and the town 
beyond. Primitive enough is this Texan jail — a common two-story brick struc- 
ture — surrounded with a high wall, garnished with cruel glass, set in cement. 
In the jail-yard you may see still life — very still life. The jailer has just let 
the prisoners out from their steaming ovens, and they are stretched on the scant 
grass, a motley crew— -an old man, with a hang-dog look, and eyes which seem 
to fear any one's face as he blinks in the sun's glare ; a frowsy, mean negro girl, 
slouched down upon a water-butt, smoking a corn-cob pipe ; and half-a-dozen 
stout black men, hideous in rags and dirt. 

At the jail's front there is a little tower and a kind of mediaeval gate, where 
the prisoners sometimes huddle to watch a passing circus or to note the ad- 
vent of a new prisoner. Invitingly 
near stands the Court-House, whence 
now and then issue legal-looking 
gentlemen, furiously masticating to- 
bacco. 

Beyond the Cathedral, with its 
graceful group of roofs, there is a 
stretch of dusty roadway, and, farther 
still, a herd of young horses quietly 
feeding. Yon dusky horseman means 
to bring them in. Ha ! Like the 
wind they fly— every nerve and sinew 
strained. Escaped? No: The 
black centaur speeds beyond them 
like a flash, and the homeward race 
begins — wild but decisive. Here 
The catholic Cathedral- Galveston'. and there dead cattle lie scattered. 




io8 



SUNSET ON THE BEACH. 



Here is the very aspect of the San Antonio plains within a mile of the principal 
seaport of Texas. 

Evening : The tide is out, and you may promenade the Gulf shore along a 
hard, unyielding track left by the receded water, and watch the negro fisherman 
as he throws his line horizonward, to see it swirl and fall in the retreating surf to 
come up laden with scaly treasure. The blue of the water, the dark of the 
seemingly endless strip of beach, the faint crimson, or the purple, or the gold of 
the sunset sky, form delicious contrasts. A few sails steal seaward like unquiet 
ghosts ; miles away, at a rugged promontory, where the tide is beginning to set 
about and come in again, the sky seems to have come down to kiss the sea, 




%\n 



"Watch the negro fisherman as he throws his line horizonward." 

so exquisitely do colors of heaven and water blend ; the long line of carriages 
hurries cityward ; lights seem to spring from the very bosom of the sea, so low 
and trustingly does the little islet- town lie on the Gulf's surface ; the orange- 
trees and the fig-shrubs send forth a delicate perfume in the cool air of the 
twilight. 

The depth of water on the various bars at the ports along the Texan coast is 
so shallow that most of them can never receive the largest shipping; but the 
plan of Captain Howells, the department engineer, for the improvement of the 
entrance to Galveston Bay, is an excellent one, and contemplates the admission 
of vessels drawing eighteen feet of water. 



THE CANAL PROTECT SOCIETY THE "NEWS." IOQ 

The merchants of Galveston will hardly be contented until they have Liver- 
pool ships of largest draught at their very docks. They have built a wharf rail- 
road which enables the loading of vessels directly from the cars, avoiding tedious 
transfers. They are also planning for a canal to connect the Rio Grande with 
the Mississippi. This canal would be of immense advantage to South-western 
Louisiana and South-eastern Texas ; and it is estimated that it would bring into 
cultivation nearly 4,000,000 acres of land adapted to the raising of sea- island 
cotton. But this is one of the measures which will probably come with the 
"moving of the Mexican frontier." 

Society in Galveston is good, cultured and refined; and the standard of 
education is excellent, judging from the large number of institutions of learning 
in the city. The Collegiate Institution, the Catholic College, the Convent for 
Women, the Galveston Female Seminary, the Medical College, and several 
German schools, all have fine reputations. The new Methodist and Episcopal 
churches, and the Cathedral are the finest religious edifices in the State. 

On Tremont street stands the beautiful Opera House, where is also located 
the office of The Galveston News. This paper, founded by Willard Richardson, 
is by far the ablest Democratic journal in Texas, and takes high rank in the 
South-west. Its founder has been conspicuous in aiding by word and work, 
the upbuilding of Texas, and through a long series of years, has published the 
"Texas Almanac," a voluminous and faithful record of the great common- 
wealth's progress. 

Galveston also has its Club, "The Gulf City," frequented by many of the 
prominent citizens of the State. Few cities, with a population of twenty-five 
or thirty thousand are more spirited ; though manufacturing, as a solid basis 
is, nevertheless, a supreme need. 



X. 



A VISIT TO HOUSTON. 



THE need of manufactures is, indeed, strongly felt throughout Texas. In 
nearly every county farmers and merchants are paying treble and quadru- 
ple the prices they can afford to pay for goods brought thousands of miles, 
whereas, local investment in manufacturing establishments would enable them to 
multiply facilities for agricultural development, and for the comfort and culture of 
which the interior is now so barren. 

Now that transit facilities have come, such an outgrowth of manufactures 
may be looked for. 

The wheat region of Texas comprehends 40,000 square miles. ' What millions 
of barrels of flour, if proper mills were at hand, might be placed in the market 
two months in advance of consignments from the West! 

Houston has already begun the manufacture of cotton cloth, and applicants 
for situations in the mills are so numerous that the employers are embarrassed by 
them. At Hempstead, New Braunfels, and the State Penitentiary, this manufac- 




"The cotton train is already a familiar spectacle on all the great trunk lines." 

ture is prosperous ; yet I doubt if more than $1,000,000 is thus invested in the 
whole State. The people of Texas are learning that they have in their very 
midst all the elements necessary to support life and make it comfortable and 
even luxurious; and they are making a genuine effort to secure and hold 
Northern and Western capital. 

In a few years cotton and woolen mills will rapidly multiply in Texas ; labor 
will be cheap, because of the cheapness of provisions and the ease with which life 
is sustained ; and Northern capital will find one of its most profitable fields in the 
very region which, ten years ago, was hardly counted among the cotton and 
woolen producing sections of the South. The "cotton train" is already a 



REMINISCENCES OF HOUSTON AS A CAPITAL. Ill 

familiar spectacle on all the great trunk lines. It is carefully guarded against 
danger from fire by vigilant negroes, and when seen at a distance, crawling 
across the level lands, looks like some huge reptile, from whose nostrils issue 
smoke and steam. 

Houston is one of the most promising of Texan towns. It lies fifty miles 
inland from Galveston, on Buffalo Bayou, and is now the central point of a com- 
plicated and comprehensive railway system. It was christened after the resolute, 
strong-hearted and valiant man whose genius so aided in creating an independent 
Texas, and it cherishes his memory tenderly. It is the ambitious rival of 
Galveston, and because nature has endowed its streets with unusual capacity 
for muddiness, Galveston calls its inhabitants "mud-turtles." A free exchange 
of satiric compliments between the two infant cities is of frequent occurrence. 

In the days of the Texan republic, when Houston was the capital, it was an 
important point. Only fifteen miles below the present town limits, on the banks 
of the picturesque bayou, that republic was born ; for the travail of San Jacinto 
certainly brought it to the light. Audubon, the naturalist, has left a curious 
memorial of Houston as it was during the republic. The residence of President 
Houston was a typical Southern log-cabin, two large frame-works, roofed, and 
with a wide passage-way between. Audubon found the President dressed in a 
fancy velvet coat, and trowsers trimmed with broad gold lace, and was at once 
invited to take a drink with him. All the surroundings were uncouth and dirty, 
in Audubon's eyes ; but he did not fail to recognize that the stern men who had 
planted a liberty pole on that desolate prairie in memory of the battle of San 
Jacinto would make Texas an autonomy. They did their rough work in their 
rough way; but it will stand for all time. The old "Capitol," now a hotel, 
stands on the main street of modern Houston. It is a plain two-story wooden 
structure, painted white; and contains the "Senate Chamber" which once 
resounded to the eloquence of the early heroes. 

Houston was a little settlement which had sprung up near the town of Harris- 
burg, the scene of many dramatic events when the republic was struggling with 
Santa Anna for its life; and the Texan Congress first met there in 1837. 
There, too, was finally and definitely established the first Texan newspaper, 
The Houston Telegi'aph, an adventurous sheet which had been forced by Mexican 
invasion to flee from town to town, until Houston's victory confirmed its right to 
live. To-day it is one of the institutions of Texas ; has been edited by men of 
rare culture ; showed wonderful enterprise in obtaining news during the war of 
secession, and is a credit to the State. 

My first visit to Houston was in winter. It was late at night when, after a 
long ride from the frontier of the Indian territory, where snow was still on the 
ground, I 

" Dropt into that magic land." 

Stepping from the train, I walked beneath skies which seemed Italian. The 
stillness, the warmth, the delicious dreaminess, the delicate languor were 
most intoxicating. A faint breeze, with a hint of perfume in it, came 



I 12 



BUFFALO BAYOU A NORTHER. 



through the lattice of my window at the hotel. The magnolias sent their 
welcome ; the roses, the dense beds of fragrant blossoms, exhaled their 
greeting. Roses bloom all winter, and in the early spring and May the 
gardens are filled with them. 

The bayou which leads from Houston to Galveston, and is one of the 
main commercial highways between the two cities, is overhung by lofty and 
graceful magnolias ; and in the season of their blossoming, one may sail for 

miles along the 
channel with the 
heavy, passionate 
fragrance of the 
queen flower drift- 
ing about him. 

Houston is set 
down upon prairie 
land; but there are 
some notable nooks 
and bluffs along 
the bayou, whose 
channel barely 
admits the passage 
of the great white 
steamer which plies 
to and from the 
coast. This bayou 
Houston hopes one 
day to widen and 
dredge all the way 
to Galveston ; but 
its prettiness and 
romance will then 
be gone. 

On the morn- 
ing of my arrival 
I was inducted into 
the mysteries of a 
"Norther," which 

"There are some notable nooks and bluffs along the bayou." Came ravin? and 

tearing over the town, threatening, to my fancy, to demolish even the housetops. 
Just previous to the outbreak, the air was clear and the sun was shining, although 
it was cold, and the wind cut sharply. This "dry Norther" was the revulsion 
after the calm and sultry atmosphere of the previous day. A cloud-wave, like a 
warning herald, rose up in the north, and then the Norther himself 

" Upon the wings of mighty winds 
Came flying all abroad." 




HOUSTON AND ITS PEOPLE, 



113 



It was glorious, exhilarating, and — icy. Suddenly the cloud vanished ; only 
a thin mist remained, and after his brief reign of a brace of hours, the Norther was 
over. He is the physician of malarious districts, from time to time purging them 
thoroughly. Sometimes he blows down houses, trees, and fences, forcing the 
beasts on the plains to huddle together .„ v -- ,__.,=^ r ^_ 

for safety; rarely, however, in his cold- 
est and most blustering moods, bring- 
ing the mercury of the thermometer 
below twenty-five degrees. 

Houston is well laid out, and grows 
rapidly, prosperous business houses 
lining its broad Main street. The 
head-quarters of the Masonic lodges 
of the State are there ; the annual State 
Fair, which brings together thousands 
of people from all the counties, every 
May, is held there; and the Germans, 
who are very numerous and wehVto-do 
in the city, have their Volks-fests and 
beer-absorbings, when the city takes 

On an absolutely Teutonic air. "The Head-quarters of the Masonic Lodges of the State." 

The colored folk are peaceable and usually well-behaved ; they have had 
something to do with the city government during the reconstruction era, and the 
supervisor of streets, and some members of the city council, at the time of my 
sojourn there, were negroes. The railroads are hastening Houston's prosperity. 
The quiet inhabitants who came to the town a quarter of a century ago, and who, 
frightened by the fancied perils of the Gulf, have never since been back to " the 
States," hear of the route from " Houston to St. Louis in sixty hours," with 





"The railroad depots are everywhere crowded with negroes, immigrants, tourists and speculators." [Page 114.] 



ii4 



HOUSTON AS A RAILWAY CENTRE. 




superstitious awe. It opens a new country to them. Northern Texas, even, 
seems to them like a far-off world. They hardly realize that within twenty-four 
hours' ride a new Texas is springing up, which, in commercial glory and power, 
will far surpass the old. 

The future commercial importance of Houston can readily be seen by 

examining its location with regard to railway lines. The Houston and Texas 

^^r Central connects it by a direct line 

st3 with Denison in Northern Texas, with 

the Missouri, Kansas and Texas rail- 
way through the Indian Territory and 
South-western Missouri, and thence by 
the Missouri Pacific with St. Louis. 
The Houston and Great Northern 
route, with which the "International " 
road has been consolidated (the united 
lines taking as a new title the " Inter- 
national and Great Northern"), gives a 
through route from Columbia near the 
coast to Houston, thence to Palestine 
and Longview in Northern Texas, and 
over the "Texas and Pacific," via 

The New Market — Houston. [Page 115.] -i. «• 1' 11 j_ t» 1 ,1 a 1 

Marshall to I exarkana, on the Arkansas 
border. There it connects with the new Cairo and Fulton and Iron Mountain 
route to St. Louis. The Texas and Pacific road also gives it connection with 
Shreveport and with the road projected from that point across Northern Louisiana 
to Vicksburg in Mississippi. Houston is connected 
with Galveston by the Galveston, Houston and 
Henderson road, now under the control of Thomas 
W. Pierce of Boston, who is also building tile Gal- 
veston, Harrisburg and San Antonio road, now com- 
pleted to within forty miles of San Antonio. The 
extension of the New Orleans, Mobile and Texas 
railroad through Louisiana to the Texan border will 
be of immense advantage to Houston. 

At the time of my visit there were about l,lOO 
miles of completed railroad in Texas; and the pro- 
jected routes, and surveys, indicated a determination 
to build at least as many more lines, opening up the 
whole of Northern Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. 
Although the roads have been laid down with sur- 
prising rapidity, they are generally good, and bright 
little towns are springing up at all the junctions and 
termini. The railroad depots are everywhere crowded 
with negroes, immigrants, tourists, and speculators. 

T^, 1 j" rj-UTLTi. j t- /- 1 "The ragged urchin with his saucy 

I he head-quarters ol the Houston and lexas Central, face." [Page us.] 




MANUFACTURES SOCIETY. 



115 



and of the International and Great Northern roads, are at Houston. The former 
route, of which William E. Dodge, of New York, is president, was chartered 
in 1 848, and had built eighty miles of its line before the war. All the rest has 
been done since 1861, and it now stretches, 340 miles from Houston to the Red 
river, 115 miles from Hempstead to Austin, the Texan capital, and 45 miles from 
Bremond to Waco, one of the most promising towns of the northern section. 
Galusha A. Grow, the noted Pennsylvania politician, has taken up his abode 
in Texas, and presides over the destinies of the International and Great 
Northern railroad. 

Thus connected with the outer world, Houston grows daily in commercial 
importance, and should be made a prominent manufacturing centre. At present, 
however, there are only the Eureka and Houston City cotton mills, running a few 
thousand spindles ; the various railroad machine and repair shops ; a fine new 
market and opera-house combined; a few brick yards, beef packeries, and foun- 
dries. In the vicinity, among the pineries along the bayou, there are numbers 




'The negro on his dray, racing 



.-humoredly with his fellows." [Page 116.] 



of steam saw-mills, which furnish lumber to be worked into the " saloons," 
hotels, and shops of the ambitious new towns in the recently opened northern 
region. 

There is a frankness and cordiality about the society of Houston which is 
refreshing to one coming from the more precise and cautious East ; the manners 
of the people are simple, courteous, delightful ; there are, in the little city, many 
families of culture and social distinction, whose hospitality renders a sojourn 
among them memorable. The Texan of the South is, if possible, possessed of 
more State pride than his brother of Northern Texas: he is never tired of 
declaiming of the beauties of the climate, and is extremely sensitive to criticism. 
Above all, do not tell the Texan maiden that her land is not the fairest ; for the 
women of this Southern commonwealth are even more idolatrous of their beau- 
tiful homes than are the men. There is a touch of defiance in the loving manner 
with which they linger over the praise of Texas; they talk best and look prettiest 
when they are praising "stars which Northern skies have never known." They 
show the same content with their own section as is found in France, and a leaning 



n6 



TYPES FROM NEGRO-LIFE. 



toward incredulity if one speaks of landscapes more perfect or of flowers more 
rare than those of the " Lone Star State ! " 

The street life is interesting ; the negro on his dray, racing good-humoredly 
with his fellows ; the ragged urchin with his saucy face and his bundle of mag- 
nolia-blossoms ; and the auctioneer's "young man," with mammoth bell and 
brazen voice, are all interesting types, which, as the reader will observe, the 
genial and careful artist has faithfully reproduced. 




'The auctioneer's young man." 



XL 



PICTURES FROM PRISON AND FIELD. 



ABOUT fifteen miles from Houston, on the banks of the bayou, and upon a 
dull, uninteresting plain, is the site of the famous battle of San Jacinto. 
The character of Houston who fought it, annihilating a Mexican force more than 
twice as large as his own, and capturing the redoubtable Santa Anna, is, and 
always will be, the subject of much heated discussion in Texas. 

Few men have ever left such firm friends and such implacable enemies. 
There are two versions of every episode of Texan history with which he was 
connected, his enemies invariably representing him as a man of bad and design- 
ing nature, without special ability, while his friends magnify the real excellence 
of his character into exalted heroism. 

"Sam Houston" was a man of extraordinary merit, sternness, strength of will, 
and was possessed of a foresight quite beyond the ordinary range. He was a 
Virginian by birth, the 
hardy son of hardier and 
noble parents, going in his 
youth with his widowed 
mother to Tennessee, then 
the boundary between the 
white man and the Cherokee 
Indian. His education was 
slight, and, being refused, 
when at school, the privilege 
of learning Greek, which he 
desired after reading a trans- 
lation of the Iliad, he swore 
that he would never recite 
another lesson, and kept his 
word. 

He crossed the Tennessee 
river and joined the Indians, 
remaining with them until 
his manhood. Some time 
later he distinguished him- 
self in the war against the 
Creeks, and in 1823 was 
elected to Congress from 




n8 



SAM HOUSTON AND HIS 



1ATTLES. 




Trinity River. 



Tennessee. An unfortunate marriage seems finally to have decided his career. 
While governor of Tennessee, in 1829, he suddenly separated from his newly 
married wife, resigned his high office, and returned to his friends the Cherokees. 
After remaining with them for some years he again mingled with white men, 
and in 1833, entering Texas politics, leaped to the front, became the commander- 
in-chief of the Texan armies, and, in the face of the 
determined opposition of an empire of 8,000,000 
of people established the independence of the State. 
There is but little of interest on the battle-ground 
of San Jacinto to-day. The ride down the bayou 
from Houston is delightful ; but, arrivii 
plain, one sees only a dreary ex- 
panse, and the line of rising ground 
where, on the 21st of April, 1836, 
the Texans established their camp. 
On that field, with his little band 
of war-worn Texans, General Hous- 
ton made his final stand against the 
formidable forces of Santa Anna. 
Suddenly rallying his almost ex- 
hausted men, he charged upon the 
enemy, smote them hip and thigh, trampled them into the morasses and 
bayous, and terribly avenged the Alamo, and its kindred massacres. 

The Texans engaged in the battle numbered 783, and the Mexicans lost 630 
killed ! The next day Santa Anna was found lying prone in the grass near the 
field of battle, — his disgraced head covered with a blanket, — and was made 
prisoner. Texas was effectually wrested from the cruel grasp of Mexico. 

Houston possessed remarkable eloquence and great magnetic power. His 
speech had a certain majesty about it which was in itself convincing to the popu- 
lar ear. A man of many faults, he was full of the pride and joy of life, although 
at times intemperate and choleric. There are many traditions in Houston of his 
fondness for gaming, his adventures after drinking freely, and his power of control 
over others. When the late war came he stood a magnificent bulwark against 
the waves of secession and indecision, and always spoke his mind. Never, in the 
maddest moments, was he denounced ; his person and his opinions were held 
sacred, and he died peacefully at Huntsville before the great struggle was ended. 
In the various portraits extant of him there is as much difference as in the 
opinions of his friends and enemies. The most authentic gives him a keen, 
intellectual face, somewhat softened from its original determination by age and 
repose, but emphatically a manly and powerful one. 

The courtesy of President Grow, of the "International and Great Northern" 
railroad, placed a special train at the disposition of the artist and myself during 
our stay in Houston, and we visited the banks of that charming stream, the 
Trinity river, and the fertile lands beside it ; then turning aside to look at 
the great State Penitentiary, where nearly a thousand convicts are registered, 



THE CONVICT TRAIN PRISONERS LABOR. 



II 9 



more than half of whom are employed, like galley slaves, as hewers of wood 
and stone on the railroads and highways. 

The sight of the "convict train" is one of the experiences of Texan travel 
which still clings like a horrid nightmare in my memory. To come upon it 
suddenly, just at twilight, as I did, at some lonely little station, when the abject, 
cowering mass of black and white humanity in striped uniform had crouched 
down upon the platform cars ; to see the alert watchmen standing at each end of 
every car with their hands upon their cocked and pointed rifles; to see the relaxed 
muscles and despairing faces of the overworked gang, was more than painful. 

Once, when we met this train, a gentleman recognized an old servant, and cried 
out to him, " What, Bill, are you there ?" and the only answer was a shrinking 
of the head, and a dropping of the under jaw in the very paralysis of shame. 




"We frequently passed large gangs of the convicts chopping logs in the forest by the roadside." [Page 120.] 

The convict labor is contracted for, and is of great value in the building of 
the railways and the clearing of forests. As a rule, the men are worked from 
dawn to dark, and then conveyed to some near point, to be locked up in cars or 
barracks constructed especially for them. They are constantly watched, working 
or sleeping; and the records of the Penitentiary show many a name against 
which is written, " Killed while trying to escape." 



120 THE PENITENTIARY AN INDIAN PRISONER. 

We frequently passed large gangs of the convicts chopping logs in the forest 
by the roadside ; they were ranged in regular rows, and their axes rose and fell 
in unison. When they had finished one piece of work, the stern voice of the 
supervisor called them to another, and they moved silently and sullenly to the 
indicated task. In the town where the Penitentiary is located, it is not unusual 
to see convicts moving about the streets, engaged in teaming, carpentry, or 
mason work; these are commonly negroes, sent to the Penitentiary for trivial 
offences, and denominated "trusties." Sambo and Cuffee have found the way 
of the transgressor unduly hard in Texas and most of the Southern States, since 
the war liberated them. The pettiest larceny now entitles them to the State's 
consideration, and the unlucky blackamoor who is misty as to the proper owner- 
ship of a ragged coat, or a twenty-five cent scrip, runs risk of the " convict 
train" for six months or a year. One good result, however, seems to have 
followed this unrelenting severity ; you may leave your baggage unprotected 
anywhere on the Texan lines of travel, and no one will disturb it. 

A branch line of rail leads from the main trunk of the " International and 
Great Northern" to the Penitentiary, prettily situated among green fields and 
pleasant hills. It is vigilantly guarded everywhere by armed men. Inside, the 
shops are light and cheery, and the men and women, even the "lifers," who 
have stained their hands with blood, look as contented in the cotton spinning 
room as the ordinary factory hand does after a few years of eleven hours' toil 
daily. The prisoners make shoes, clothing, furniture and wagons, weave good 
cottons and woolens, and it is even proposed to set them at building cars. 

The large number of prisoners serving life sentences seemed surprising until, 
upon looking over the register, we noted the frequency of the crime of murder. 
The cases of murderous assault — classified under the head of "attempt to kill" — 
were generally punished by a term of two to five years ; never more. At the 
time of my visit there were seventy persons so sentenced. 

Since the passage of the act making the carrying of concealed weapons 
illegal, these commitments are not so common. Yet the Democratic Legislature 
last assembled — true to its principle of undoing all which had been done by its 
Republican predecessors — would gladly have repealed the law. 

In a corridor of the Penitentiary I saw a tall, finely-formed man, with 
bronzed complexion, and long, flowing, brown hair- — a man princely in carriage, 
and on whom even the prison garb seemed elegant. It was Satanta, the chief of 
the Kiowas, who with his brother chief, Big Tree, is held to account for murder. 
Being presently introduced to a venerable bigamist who, on account of his 
smattering of Spanish, was Satanta's interpreter, I was, through this obliging 
prisoner, presented at court. 

Satanta had stepped into the work-room, where he was popularly supposed 
to labor, although he never performed a stroke of work, and had seated himself 
on a pile of oakum. His fellow-prisoner explained to Satanta, in Spanish, that I 
desired to converse with him, whereupon he rose, and suddenly stretching out 
his hand, gave mine a ponderous grasp, exclaiming as he did so, " How !" He 
then replied through his interpreter to the few trivial questions I asked, and 



AN INTERVIEW WITH SATANTA COUNTRY JAILS. 



121 



again sat down, motioning to me to be seated, with as much dignity and grace 
as though he were a monarch receiving a foreign ambassador. His face was 
good ; but there was a delicate curve of pain at the lips which contrasted oddly 
with the strong Indian cast of the other features. Although much more than 
sixty years old, he hardly seemed forty, so erect was he, so elastic and vigorous. 

When asked if he ever expected liberation, and what he would do if it should 
come, he responded, with the most stoical indifference, " Quien sabe ?." "Big 
Tree" was meanwhile briskly at work in another apartment plaiting a chair seat, 
and vigorously chewing tobacco. His face was clear cut and handsome, his coal 
black hair swept his shoulders, and he paused only to brush it back, give us a 
swift glance, and then turn briskly to his plaiting as before. The course pursued 
toward these Indians seems the proper one ; it is only by imposing upon them 
the penalties to which other residents 
of the State are subject that they can 
be taught their obligations.* 

The Penitentiary in Texas is sat- 
isfactorily conducted, being leased from 
the State by enterprising persons who 
make it a real industrial school, albeit a 
severe one. But certain of the jails in 
the State are a disgrace to civilization, 
and many intelligent people at Austin 
spoke with horror of the manner in 

which criminals were treated in the (§^ _- _ v^l^t 

"black-hole" in that place. All the 
barbarities of the Middle Ages seemed 
in force in it. 

There is also a certain contempt for 
the ordinary board or brick county jail, 
manifested by a class of desperadoes 

and OUtlaWS, Unhappily not yet extinct in "Satanta had seated himself on a pile of oakum." 

the remote sections of the State. During my last visit to Austin, the inhabitants 
were excited over a daring jail delivery effected in an adjacent county by a band 
of outlaws. Some of their fellows had been secured, and the outlaws rode 
to the jail, in broad daylight, attacked it, and rescued the criminals, killing -one 
or two of the defenders, and firing, as a narrator told me, with a touch of 
enthusiasm in his voice, "about eighty shots in less 'n three minutes." Not 
long after, tidings were brought us of the descent of an armed body of men 
upon the jail in Brenham, a large and prosperous town, and the rescue of crim- 
inals there. 

As a rule, however, such acts of lawless violence are due more to the careless- 
ness of the law officers in securing their prisoners than to any defiance of law. 
It would be singular if, in a State once so overrun by villains as Texas, there were 




Satanta and Big Tree have since been set at liberty. 



122 PICTURES FROM THE PLAINS. 

no defiant rascals still unhung. Governor Davis, in his last annual message, 
admitted that in four-fifths of the counties the jails were not secure, and that the 
constant escape of prisoners was made the excuse for a too free exercise of lynch 
law upon persons accused of offences. He also added that the jails so constructed 
as to secure the prisoners confined in them were dens unfit for the habitation 
of wild beasts. 

To the credit of Texas, however, it should be said that political bitterness 
rarely, if ever, has any part in the scenes of violence enacted in certain counties ; 
the rude character of the people, and the slow return to organized society 
after the war, being the real causes of the troubles in those regions. Under 
the reconstruction government, law and order had returned, and it is to be hoped 
that the now dominant legislators will do nothing to hinder their supremacy in 
the by-ways as well as the highways of the State. The Democratic Legislature 
can ill afford to undo the wise legislation which established a State police for 
the arrest and punishment of outlaws, and which forbade the carrying of con- 
cealed weapons. 

The little towns along the International and Great Northern railroad are as 
yet very primitive, and constructed upon the same monotonous, stereotyped plan 
as those on the Red river. From Houston to Palestine the road runs through a 
country of great possibilities. On all these new lines the picture is very much 
the same. Let us take one as it looks in the early dawn. 

Morning comes sharply on the great plains, and sends a thrill of joy through 
all nature. The screaming engine frightens from the track a hundred wild-eyed, 
long-horned cattle that stand for a moment in the swampy pools by the road- 
side, jutting out their heads, flourishing their tails angrily, and noisily bellowing, 
as if resenting the impertinence of the flame-breathing iron monster, and then 
bound away like deer. 

On the slope of a little hill stand a dozen horses, gazing naively at 
the train; a shrill yell from the steam- throttle sends them careering half a 
mile away, their superb necks extended, their limbs spurning the ground. 
Behind them gallop a hundred pigs, grimy and fierce, snorting impatiently 
at being disturbed. 

In the distance one can see an adroit horseman lassoing the stupid beef 
creature which he has marked for slaughter. He drives it a little apart from the 
herd, and it turns upon him ; a quick twirl of his wrist, and he has thrown the 
deadly noose about its neck ; a rapid gallop of a few seconds, and he has tight- 
ened the long rope. The horse seems to enjoy the sport, bracing himself as the 
animal makes a few angry struggles, and then gallops rapidly once more away. 
The poor beef, now in the tortures of suffocation, falls upon his knees and 
staggers blindly and heavily forward, bellowing hoarsely and brandishing his 
horns ; again he falls headlong ; and once more piteously bellows as much as his 
choked throat will permit. The disturbed herd walk slowly and mournfully 
away, huddling together as if for protection. At last the horseman, loosening a 
little the dreadful noose, forces the subdued creature to follow him submissively, 
and so takes him to the slaughter. 



NEW TOWNS CAMPING OUT. 



123 



This wonderful expanse of plain, which melts away so delicately into the 
bright blue of the cloudless sky, has inspiration in it. The men and women 
whom one meets at the little stations along the road are alert and vigorous; 
the glow of health is upon them ; the very horses are full of life, and gallop 
briskly, tossing their heads and distending their nostrils. 

Every half hour we reach some small town of board shanties, crowned with 
ambitious signs. Each of these hamlets is increasing weekly by fifties and 
hundreds in population. As the train passes, the negroes gather in groups to 
gaze at it until it disappears in the distance. At one lonely little house on the 
edge of a superb wheat country a group of Germans, newly come, is patiently 




"As the train passes, the negroes gather in groups to gaze at it until it disappears in the distance." 

waiting transportation into the interior. The black-gowned, bare-headed women 
are hushing the babies and pointing out to each other the beauties of the strange 
new land. 

Not far away is the timber line which marks the course of a little creek, 
whose romantic banks are fringed with loveliest shrubbery. A log cabin's 
chimney sends up a blue smoke-wreath, and a tall, angular woman is cutting 
down the brush near the entrance. A little farther on, half-a-dozen small tents 
glisten in the morning sun ; the occupants have just awoke, and are crawling out 
to bask in the sunshine and cook their coffee over a fire of twigs. The air is 
filled with joyous sounds of birds and insects, with the tinkling of bells, with the 
rustling of leaves, with the rippling of rivulets. One longs to leave the railroad, 
and plunge into the inviting recesses which he imagines must lie within reach. 



124 JEFFERSON MARSHALL NORTH-EASTERN TEXAS. 

The Houston and Texas Central railroad route runs through neither a bold 
nor broken country, but is bordered for at least a hundred miles by exquisite 
foliage and thickets. At Hearne, 120 miles from Houston, it meets the Interna- 
tional line running to Longview, and furnishing the route to Jefferson, at the head 
of the chain of lakes extending to Shreveport, in Louisiana. 

These lakes were formed by the obstructions created by the Red river 
raft, and Jefferson has become, by the diversion of the waters of this river from 
their natural channel, the head of navigation in that section. An important 
steamboat commerce with New Orleans, St. Louis, and Cincinnati has sprung up 
here, and Jefferson now exports nearly 100,000 bales of cotton annually. Before 
the Texas Pacific railroad branch from Marshall was completed, 20,000 wagons 
freighted with cotton yearly entered the town. Though the war found Jefferson 
a miserable collection of one-story shanties, it is now a city of 10,000 inhabit- 
ants, with elegant brick buildings, and a trade of $20,000,000 annually. To 
what it may grow, now that it is connected with the direct route to St. Louis, and 
that 15,000 square miles of territory in Northern Texas are opened to settlement, 
no one can tell. Marshall not only enjoys much the same advantages as Jefferson, 
but is the head-quarters in Texas of the great Texas and Pacific railway which 
the famous Scott is stretching across the country to El Paso, and which is already 
completed beyond Dallas. The same genius now presides over the destinies of 
the Transcontinental line, to run through the upper counties from Texarkana to 
Fort Worth, where the two routes are merged in the main line, which shoots out 
thence straight to the Mexican frontier. 

The International railroad as originally planned was to extend via Austin 
and San Antonio into Mexico; but a Democratic Legislature refused to accord 
the aid offered by its Republican predecessor. 

North-eastern Texas has extensive iron interests, and, throughout the counties 
in the vicinity of Jefferson, large foundries are grouping villages around them. 
These beds of iron ore, lying so near the head of steamboat navigation, are 
destined to an immense development. All the north of the State is rich in 
minerals. 

In the wild Wichita regions, where exploring parties have braved the Indians, 
there is an immense copper deposit, continuing thence hundreds of miles, even to 
the Rio Grande. The copper ore from some of the hills has been tested, and 
will yield fifty-five per cent, of metal. Notwithstanding even the expense of 
transporting ore 500 miles by wagon, the copper mines of Archer County have 
proved profitable. All the requisites for building furnaces and smelting the ores 
exist in the immediate vicinity of the deposits. The whole copper region is 
exquisitely beautiful. The mountains are bold and romantic ; the valleys 
mysterious and picturesque; the plains covered with flowers — and Indians! 
But who will let the ignoble savage stand in the way of mineral development ? 

The Indian troubles in North-western Texas are quite as grave as those in the 
extreme western part of the State. Now and then an adventurous frontiersman 
is swept down by the remorseless savage, who seems to delight in waiting until 
his victim fancies he has attained security before murdering him and his family. 



WACO DALLAS THE LABOR QUESTION. 125 

Government should certainly afford better protection to the settler on the 
extreme frontier — by some other method if it cannot do it by means of the 
regular army. 

Waco, now a fine town, on a branch of the Texas Central, was once an 
Indian village, and, long ago, was the scene of a formidable battle between the 
Wacos and some Cherokee forces. The noble Wacos had acquired, in a surrepti- 
tious manner, a good many Cherokee ponies, and, in the pursuit and battle 
which followed, the Waco village was plundered and burned, and extensive forti- 
fications — traces of which still remain — were heaped with the conquered thieves' 
dead bodies. Waco, situated on the Brazos river, is to-day a handsome, solidly- 
built town, possessing many manufacturing establishments. Throughout all the 
adjacent region stock-raising is fast giving way to agriculture ; and great fields 
of cotton, corn and cane are springing into existence. Every one has heard of 
Dallas, set down on the banks of the Trinity river, and contributed to by the 
great feeders of the Texas Central and Texas Pacific. It grows like an 
enchanted castle in a fairy tale. Dallas is the centre of Northern Texas ; has 
superb water power, and lumber, coffee, iron, lead, and salt fields to draw upon. 
In the midst of the rich, undulating prairies, and near a plateau covered with 
noble oaks, elms and cedars, it promises to be beautiful as well as prosperous. It 
is also one of the centres of the wheat region, some of the finest wheat lands on 
the continent being in its vicinity. The absolutely best wheat region is said to 
be in Lamar, Hunt, Kaufman, and Navarro counties. 

The eastern corners of the lands now settled in Northern Texas were nearly 
all held by emigrants from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi until the railroad's 
advent, when the North-westerner joined them in the country, and the Northerner 
mingled with them in the towns. Slavery flourished there before the war, and 
the revolution improved neither the negro nor his old master much; so that both 
are gradually yielding before the new-comers. 

In the northern and middle counties, however, slavery never was popular. 
Some 3,000 families from Indiana and Illinois were introduced into those 
counties between 1843 and 1854. They owned no slaves and never desired 
any; and the influence of their example was good even before emancipation 
came. Hundreds of intelligent and cultured families live there, happy and 
well-to-do, sowing their wheat and rye in October, and reaping it in June ; 
planting corn in February, to harvest in September ; and raising great herds of 
cattle and horses. 

The black, sandy lands are admirably suited for orchards and vineyards ; and 
the " black- waxy," — a rich alluvial, — for all the cereals. As all the cotton lands 
of Northern Texas will readily produce a bale to the acre, how many years will 
pass before the cotton crop of the Lone Star State will be 10,000,000 bales? 

The labor question is to t>e an engrossing one in Texas very soon. The 
proportion of the colored to the entire population being small, the negroes' share 
in the labor of cultivation is, of course, not large. The Chinaman is already at 
St. Louis ; the completion of the Texas Pacific railroad will establish him 
along the whole Texan coast. At present, in great numbers of the counties, 



126 MINERALS — AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES. 

there is hardly one negro to fifty white people, so that Cuffee stands no whit in 
the way of John. 

With one single field of coal covering 6,000 square miles ; with apparently 
inexhaustible copper and iron stores; with lead and silver mines; with 20,000,000 
of acres of cotton-bearing land, and with agricultural resources equal to those of 
any State in the Union, Texas can enter upon her new career confidently and 
joyously. As a refuge for the ruined of our last great revolution, she is benefi- 
cent ; as an element of greatness in the progress of the United States, she has no 
superior. She has peculiar advantages over her sister Southern States. While 
they vainly court emigration, the tide flows freely across her borders, and 
spreads out over her vast plains. Whatever danger there may be of political 
disagreements and disturbances within her limits, nothing can permanently 
impede her progress. Lying below the snow line, she furnishes the best route 
to the Pacific ; fronting on the Gulf, she will some day have a commercial navy, 
whose sails will whiten every European sea. 

Few persons who have not visited the South appreciate the vast extent of 
territory which the Texas and Pacific route has opened up. Its most beneficent 
work will be the chasing of the Indian from the vicinity of the " cross-timber " 
country, which is an excellent location for small farmers. The settlers there are 
bravely holding on to their lands, keeping up a continual warfare with the red- 
skins, in hopes that they may preserve their lives until the advent of the rail. 

The Indian reserves in this section of the State have, according to the 
testimony of competent authorities, all been failures, whether considered as 
protection to the white man or as a means of civilization to the Indian. For ten 
years the savage has been master of all that part of Texas. The new Pacific 
route will not only send a civilizing current through there, but will also develop 
a portion of the great " Staked Plain " territory, now one of the unknown and 
mysterious regions of Northern Texas. The Transcontinental branch is doing 
good pioneer work in new counties. It also runs through some of the oldest 
and most cultured sections of the State. 

Clarksville, in Red River county, has long been a centre of intelligence and 
refinement; it was settled early in 18 17, and in i860 had under cultivation nearly 
17,000 acres of corn and 8,000 acres of cotton. It is noteworthy that in this 
county lands which have been steadily cultivated for fifty years show no depreci- 
ation in quality. Paris, a handsome town in Lamar county, is also touched by 
this line. These towns and counties offer a striking contrast to other portions of 
the northern section which lie within a day's journey of them. They are like 
oases, but the rest of the apparent desert is being so rapidly reclaimed, that they 
will soon be noticeable no longer. By all means let him who wishes to cultivate 
fruit, cotton, or the cereals in Texas visit these elder counties. 



XII. 



AUSTIN, THE TEXAN CAPITAL — POLITICS — SCHOOLS. 



MY various journeys to Austin, the capital of Texas, enabled me to judge 
of its winter and summer aspects, and I do not hesitate to pronounce 
them both delightful. The town itself is not so interesting at first sight as either 
Galveston or Houston ; but every day adds to the charm which it throws about 
the visitor. At Austin the peculiarities of Western and Eastern Texas meet and 
compromise ; one sees the wild hunter of the plains and the shrewd business 
man of the coast 
side by side in 
friendly inter- 
course. The ma- 
jority of the 
public buildings 
are not architect- 
urally fine ; the 
Capitol, the Land 
Office, the Gov- 
ernor's Mansion, 
are large and com- 
modious, but not 
specially interest- 
ing. But a touch 
of the grand old 
Spanish architect- 
ure has Crept into The State Capitol— Austin. 

the construction of the Insane Asylum, which is built of the soft gray sand- 
stone so abundant in that region ; and the edifice, standing in a great park, 
whose superb trees seem to have been cultured for centuries, rather than to be 
mere gifts of nature, is very beautiful. 

It is, however, overcrowded with unfortunates, and the State's imperative 
duty is to build another asylum at once. Under the rich glow of the February 
sun the white walls of the structure formed a delicious contrast to- the foliage of 
the live oaks near at hand, making it seem more like a temple than like the 
retreat of clouded reason. In wandering through the wards I came suddenly 
upon a group of idiot girls, seated on benches in a niche before a sunny window. 
These poor creatures cowered silently — grimacing now and then — as I stood 
gazing upon them, when suddenly one or two of them, doubtless excited by the 

9 




128 



TEXAS STATE INSTITUTIONS. 




presence of a visitor, rose and began dancing and shrieking. The suddenness of 
the transition, and the fearful, mysterious nature of these idiotic saturnalia, 
appalled me. I avow that I could hardly drag my limbs to the door, and when 
once more in the sunlight I felt as if I had come from Dante's Hell. The 

cheery German physician in charge 
complained of the overcrowded con- 
dition of the asylum, adding that as 
the majority of the cases brought him 
had already become chronic, it was a 
hopeless throng with which he had 
to deal. 

In a yard of the asylum, comfort- 
ably inclosed, and covered by a pic- 
turesque roof upon which a vine had 
been trained, I saw the sty in which 
"Queen Elizabeth," a filthy and dread- 
ful old negress, wallowed all day long. 
Behind green lattices neatly set into 
the walls of another building, I could 
hear the furiously insane groaning and 

The Slate Insane Asylum— Austin. shouting. It is Said that there are 

more than 1,200 insane in the State, for most of whom an asylum is necessary. 

Not far from the Lunatic Asylum, in another beautiful nook, is the institution 
for the blind, which comprises a school for the industrial training of the patients 
whose vision is hopelessly lost. The Colorado river flows to the westward of 
Austin, close to the city, issuing from 
a romantic mountain range, a long 
gap in which forms what is known 
as the Colorado Valley; and on 
the west bank of the river is an effi- 
cient and pleasant school and home 
for the deaf and dumb of the State. 

One of the notable sights of 
Austin, too, is the well-drilled little 
company of cadets from the "Texas 
Military Institute," originally located 
at Bastrop, but now situated on a 
lovely hill -side near the capital. 
The school, which is one of general 
and applied science, is modeled after 
West Point and the Virginia Military Institute, and can receive one hundred 
cadets, whose gray uniformed company is often seen in martial array in the 
lanes and fields near the town. 

Austin is very prettily set down in an amphitheatre of hills, beyond which 
rises the blue Colorado range. The little town, which boasts "from 8,000 to 




The Texas Military Institute — Austin. 



THE LEGISLATURE RECONSTRUCTION. 



129 



10,000 inhabitants," is very lively during the legislative session. One passenger 
train daily, each way, connects it with the outer world ; beyond are the 
mesquite-covered plains, and only wagon roads. 

The governor, whose term of office lasts four years, has a special mansion, 
which was the president's house when Austin was the capital of the Texan 
republic ; and the surroundings of his office at the Capitol are of Spartan plain- 
ness. In both the Senate and the House of Representatives I noticed a good 
deal of the freedom of Western and South-western manners, which would be 
counted strange in the older States. There were no objections, apparently, to 
the enjoyment of his cigar by any honorable senator on the floor of the Senate, 
if the session was not actually in progress ; senators sat with their feet upon their 
desks, and the friendly spittoon handy; but these are eccentricities which prevail 
in many a State beside Texas. There 
were men of culture and refinement in 
the Senate, others who were coarse in 
manners and dress ; the president was 
amiable and efficient. One or two 
negroes occupied senatorial chairs, 
although the Thirteenth Legislature, 
which I saw, was almost entirely Dem- 
ocratic. The House of Representatives 
was a sensible, shrewd - looking body 
of men, with no special Southern type ; 
a Northerner might readily have im- 
agined himself in a New England 
legislature during the session, save for 
certain peculiarities of dialect. Here, 

alsO, there Were negroes, more numer- The Governor's Mansion —Austin. 

ous than in the Senate, and mingling somewhat more freely in the business 
of the session. The portraits of Austin and Houston looked down benignantly 
upon the lawgivers. 

Texas went through a variety of vexatious trials during the period between 
the close of the war and the election of what is known as the "Davis party." 
A. J. Hamilton was appointed provisional governor by President Johnson, but 
surrendered his power in 1866 into the hands of Governor Throckmorton, the 
successful " Conservative Union" candidate, who was elected after the adoption 
of a new State constitution by a majority of more than 36,000 votes over E. M. 
Pease, the "Radical" candidate. The advent of reconstruction brought Texas 
into the Fifth Military District with Louisiana, and under the control of General 
Sheridan. In 1867 Governor Throckmorton, who was considered, an "obstacle" 
to reconstruction, was removed, and the defeated candidate Pease made governor 
in his stead. During his administration, he had a controversy with General 
Hancock, who had meantime been appointed commander of the district in place 
of Sheridan, and was prevented from undertaking several arbitrary measures 
which the military authorities deemed inexpedient at that time. 




13° THE DAVIS PARTY DEMOCRATS NOW IN POWER. 

The new registration which came into force in Texas, as elsewhere in the 
South, reduced the number of white voters from 80,000 to a little less than 
57,000. A second Constitutional Convention was held in June of 1868, in 
obedience to an order from the army authorities, then represented by General 
Rousseau, who succeeded General Hancock in command. This convention was 
presided over by Edmund J. Davis, an uncompromising loyal man, who had once 
had a Confederate rope around his neck in war-time. The State was at that 
time in a very bad condition. Murder and lawlessness were rampant ; it was 
said that there had been nine hundred homicides in the State between 1865 and 
1868. The Conservative and Radical wings of the Republican party had much 
sharp discussion in the convention, which was finally adjourned until the last 
days of November. Meantime, the differences of opinion between the wings 
of the party brought forward Mr. Davis as the Radical, and A. J. Hamilton as 
the Conservative candidate for governor. The constitution was submitted to the 
people in November, and ratified by more than 67,000 majority. Mr. Davis and 
his party were at the same time elected to power, and the military force was 
withdrawn. 

Governor Davis certainly succeeded in restoring order and maintaining peace 
in the State during the four 3/ears of his administration, although some of his 
measures were bitterly opposed. He inaugurated the militia act, which the 
Democrats of course fought against. It was an act delegating to the governor 
the power to suspend the laws in disturbed districts, and was perfectly efficient in 
the only three cases in which it was ever resorted to. During his term, also, the 
" State Police" — a corps for the maintenance of order throughout the State — 
was established, and did much to rid Texas of outlaws and murderers. 

A tax-payers' convention, held at Austin in September, 1871, united all the 
elements of opposition against the Davis party. Ex- Governors Throckmorton, 
Pease and Hamilton participated in it. The Democrats re-organized, and suc- 
ceeded in securing the Legislature, which is elected annually in Texas. Toward 
the close of Governor Davis's term, as the tenure of office of some of the State 
officials was involved in doubt, the Legislature passed an act providing for a 
general election in December. A new and vehement political contest at once 
sprang up. The Republicans renominated Governor Davis, and the Democrats, 
who had been powerfully reinforced by thousands of immigrants from Alabama, 
Georgia, and other cotton States, put forward Judge Richard Coke as their can- 
didate. In the election which followed, the Democrats elected Judge Coke as 
governor by more than 40,000 majority ; and the State was completely given 
over to the Conservative element. 

This election caused great excitement among the Republicans. Governor 
Davis, backed up by the declaration of the Supreme Court of the State that 
the recent election was unconstitutional, at first refused to yield his power, 
and called on the President for troops to maintain him in office. But the United 
States declined to interfere ; the Democrats took possession of the Capitol ; and 
Governor Davis finally withdrew his opposition. The Democrats propose in due 
time to hold another Constitutional Convention, and threaten to undo much of 



THE ALAMO MONUMENT AUSTIN IN BY-GONE DAYS. 



131 




the legislation which, under reconstruction and the regime of the Radicals, had 
proved salutary to the State. 

On the steps of the Capitol stands the small and unambitious monument 
built of stone brought from the Alamo. It is but a feeble memorial of one of the 
most tragic events in American history, to which 
the State would do well to give lasting commem- 
oration by some stately work in bronze or 
marble on Alamo plaza, in San Antonio. 

In the office of the Secretary of State at 
Austin, one may still see the treaties made 
with France, England, and other nations, when 
Texas was a republic, when Louis Phillippe was 
King of the French, and Victoria was young. 
Three years after Texas had declared her inde- 
pendence of Mexico, the commissioners ap- 
pointed under President Lamar's Administration 
selected the present site on the Colorado as the 
capital, and, in grateful remembrance of the 
"father of Texas," called it Austin. It seems, 
indeed, strange that it has not grown to the 
proportions the commissioners then predicted for 
it ; for the best of building stone and lime and 
stone-coal abound in the vicinity, and it has an The Alamo Monument— Austin. 

immense and fertile back-country to draw upon. These same commissioners 
also fondly hoped, by building the town, effectually to close the pass by 
which Indians and outlaws from Mexico had from time immemorial traveled to 
and from the Rio Grande and Eastern Texas. In October, 1839, President 
Lamar's Cabinet occupied Austin, — and, although Indian raids in the neigh- 
borhood were frequent, the brave little government remained there. Those 
were great days for Texas, — a State with hardly the population of one of her 
counties to-day, yet holding independent relations with the civilized world. 

The European governments had their representatives at the Court of Austin, 
while hosts of adventurers thronged the Congressional halls. Gayly- uniformed 
officers of the Texan army and navy abounded ; and the United States daily felt 
the pulse of the people as to annexation. Once in a while there was a dip- 
lomatic muddle and consequent great excitement, as when, — the owner of some 
pigs which had been killed for encroaching on the French Minister's premises 
having abused said minister in rather heated language, — Louis Phillippe felt 
himself insulted, and very nearly ruined the infant republic by preventing it from 
obtaining what was then known as the " French Loan.." 

The Texan government in those early days had always been a great strag- 
gler, moving from town to town, and when, in 1842, the Administration 
proposed to remove the archives to Houston, because a Mexican invasion was 
feared, the citizens of Austin revolted, and General Houston, the then President, 
was compelled to leave the records where they were. 



132 POPULATION NEGROES MEXICANS. 

In the Secretary of State's office I was shown the original ordinance for the 
secession of Texas from the Union, — a formidable parchment, graced with a 
long list of names, — and a collection of the newspapers printed in the State 
during the war, a perusal of which showed that there are several sides to the 
history of all our battles, and that in those days the Texans were taught that the 
Confederates invariably won. 

The four presidents of the Texan republic, Burnet, Houston, Lamar and 
Jones, were all strong men, but of widely different character. Lamar was a 
brilliant writer and talker, clear-headed and accomplished ; Jones was an intel- 
lectual man, bitter against the Houston party, and to judge from his own 
memoirs, jealous and irritable. He died by his own hand. 

The population of Texas has increased, since its annexation to the Union in 
1845, fro m 150,000 to more than a million of inhabitants. Its principal growth 
has, of course, been since the war, for before that time Northern Texas was as 
much a wilderness as is Presidio county to-day. The greatest needs of the State 
at the present time are more people, and more improvement along the lines of 
travel. The coarse cookery, bad beds, and villainous liquor-drinking which one 
now finds in remote towns will vanish when people and manufactures and 
inducements to ease and elegance come in. 

A favorable sign on the railroads is the occasional entrance of some rough 
fellow into the Pullman car, and his intense enjoyment of it. I recall now, 
vividly, the gaunt drover who went to bed before dark in one of the berths of a 
palace car one evening between Austin and Hempstead. " Never was in one 
of these tricks befo'," he said ; " I reckon I'll get my money's worth. But look 
yere," he added, to a gentleman near him, confidentially, " if this train should 
bust up now, where'd the balance of ye go to, d'ye reckon ?" He appeared to 
think the berth a special protective arrangement, and that he was perfectly safe 
therein. 

The negro and the Mexican are both familiar figures in Austin, and the 
negro seems to do well in his free state, although indulging in all kinds of queer 
freaks with his money ; he saves nothing. Sometimes he undertakes long 
journeys without the slightest idea where he is going, and finding he has not 
money enough to return, locates anew. As a rule, he does not acquire much 
property, expending his money on food and raiment — much of the former, and 
little of the latter. The commercial travelers in Texas all carry large stocks of 
confectionery, with which, when they fail to tempt Sambo to expend his little 
hoard in any other manner, they generally manage to exhaust his means. There 
is no idea of economy in the Texan negro's head. On the Texas railroads, the 
candy venders are allowed to roam at large through the trains and practice the 
old swindle of prize packages, by which they invariably deplete the darkey's 
purse. They display the tempting wares, and hint at the possibility of gold 
dollars and greenbacks in the packages; of course, appetite triumphs, and 
Sambo falls. 

The Land Office is one of the important institutions of Texas, and a main 
feature of Austin. The United States has no government lands in the common- 



THE TEXAS LAND OFFICE THE STATE DEBT. 



133 



wealth; and the land system, although somewhat complicated, on account of 
the various colonization laws and old titles acquired under them, is a good one. 
In the Land Office there is an experienced corps of men, who have the history 
of each county and its records at their fingers' ends, and who can trace any old 
title back to its Spanish source. Plans of all the counties, and every homestead 
on them, are also to be seen. This, in a State where the counties comprise areas 
of from 900 to 1800 square miles each, is of the utmost importance to persons 
buying land and wishing to establish a clear title to it; although, as a general 
rule, the settler who acquires land under the preemption laws of the State, has 
no trouble, and runs no risk. 

An attempt was once made to sectionize all the State public lands, — now 
amounting to nearly 90,000,000 of acres, — and to offer them, as the United States 
does, in open market, but it was thought wiser to continue the original plan. 
The legislation of Texas favors preemption, and the new settler had best go with 
it ; but he may also become the legal owner of a portion of the public domain 
by "locating a land certificate," at from 
thirty-five to sixty -five cents in gold 
per acre, and then proving his title to j- m! 
it by forming a perfect chain of deeds !p| 
from the original grantee down to him- | 
self. In doing this the facilities afforded | 
by the Land Office are, of course, in- '■ 
valuable. The State Bureau of immi- ] 
gration, located at Galveston, has com- \m 
missioners constantly in the Southern '|||| 
and Western States, and in Europe, 
soliciting immigrants to take up the =^ 
millions of acres in the Western and i-«§| 
Northern parts of the State. Judging 
from the statistics of 1872-3, I should 
say that fully three thousand persons 
monthly land at Galveston, coming from the older Southern States. How little 
we at the North have known, in these last few years, of this great, silent 
exodus, this rooting up from home and kindred, which the South has seen, and 
the anguish of which so many brave hearts have felt ! But your true 
American is peripatetic and migratory, so that perhaps the struggle is less 
intense with him than with the Europeans who crowd our shores. 

Texas owes but little money — a trifle more than $1,500,000 — and her tax- 
able property, which was estimated in 1871 at $220,000,000, and was then 
thought to be undervalued, must now be nearly $300,000,000. In most respects 
the outlook of the State is exceedingly good ; certainly as favorable for immigra- 
tion as the majority of the States of the West. The grand middle ground, more 
than 1,000 miles in extent, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, it must be 
covered with railroads in every direction ; and even the barbarity of the savages 
can last but little longer. 




The Land Office of Texas — Austin. 



134 JOURNALISM AND SCHOOLS IN TEXAS, 

Journalism has had an astonishing growth in Texas since the war. Out of 
140 newspapers now printed in the State, no have been started since the close 
of the great struggle. Most of the small new towns have two or three papers 
each, and support them handsomely. The proprietor of a weekly journal, in one 
of the mushroom cities, told me that five columns of his paper paid him $6,000 
clear profit yearly. 

Everybody — merchant, gambler, railroad contractor, clergyman, desperado — 
patronizes the newspaper, and pays large prices for advertising. The majority of 
the papers are Democratic, but in the cities the Republicans usually have influen- 
tial organs. " Democratic" does not always mean a full support of the party, but 
a kind of independent journalism, to which the air of Texas is more conducive 
than even that of the North. The Age and Union in Houston, the Civilian, Post, 
and Standard in Galveston, the Times in Jefferson, the Reporter in Tyler, and the 
State Journal, Gazette, and Statesman in Austin, and the Red River Jotimai in 
Denison, are among the principal newspapers published either daily or tri- 
weekly. Almost every county has an excellent weekly, filled with enthusiastic 
editorials on the development of the State, and appeals to the people to appre- 
ciate their advantages. The Germans have also established several influential 
journals both in Western and Eastern Texas; and all of them are very prosperous. 
In Galveston, Houston, and all the principal towns there are elegantly-appointed 
German book-stores, whose counters are freighted weekly with the intellectual 
novelties of the Old Country. 

The school question, so seriously and severely disputed in all the Southern 
States, has created much discussion in Texas ; and, indeed, the people do well to 
occupy themselves with the subject; for it is estimated that in 1873 there were 
yet in the State 70,895 white, and 150,617 colored persons over ten years of age 
who could neither read nor write. This appalling per centage of ignorance is 
gradually decreasing under the beneficent workings of the new system, which 
came in with reconstruction, and to which there was, of course, a vast deal of 
opposition. 

Texas has always been reasonably liberal in matters of education ; as early as 
1829 the laws of Coahuila and Texas made provisions for schools on the Lancas- 
trian plan ; the republic inaugurated the idea of a bureau of education, and its 
Congress took measures for establishing a State university. After annexation, 
free public schools were established, and supported by taxation on property. In 
1868 the reconstruction convention established a school fund amounting to more 
than $2,000,000; and in April, 1871, the Legislature passed an Act organizing 
a system of public free schools, and the schools were begun in September of the 
same year. 

The opposition to them took the form of complaint of the taxes, and in most of 
the leading cities the courts were overrun with petitions asking that collection of 
the school tax be restrained. In this manner the progress of the system has been 
very much embarrassed. The Texan of the old regime cannot understand how 
it is right that he should be taxed for the education of his neighbor's children ; 
neither is he willing to contribute to the fund for educating his former bondsmen. 



EDUCATION THE 



;razos country. 



135 



There have been at different times about 127,000 pupils in the public schools 
of the State, and the average number taught during the year is 80,000, while the 
whole number of children in the commonwealth is estimated at 228,355. During 
the first year of the application of the system, over 6,500 teachers were examined 
and accepted. The number of colored pupils in the public schools cannot be 
accurately determined, and mixed schools seem to be nowhere insisted upon. 
In many counties where the opposition to the payment of the tax was persistent, 
the schools were forced to close altogether. 

In the large towns, as in Houston, the Germans have united with the 
leading American citizens in inaugurating subscription schools in which the 
sexes are separated, and have introduced into them some of the best German 
methods. There has been much objection to the compulsory feature of the 




'The emigrant wagon is a familiar sight there." [Page 136.] 



free system, parents furiously defending their right to leave their children 
in ignorance. Texas needs, and intends soon to found, a university and an 
agricultural college. The latter should be opened at once. There are a good 
many thriving denominational schools scattered through the counties ; the 
Baptists have universities at Independence and Waco ; the Presbyterians at 
Huntsville ; the Lutherans at Columbus ; the Methodists at Chappell Hill ; 
and the Odd Fellows have a university at Bryan. Wherever the public 
school has been established there is a private one which is patronized by all 
the old settlers, who thus gratify their desire for exclusiveness, and embarrass 
the growth of the free system. 

Between Austin and Hempstead the river Brazos is crossed, and not far from 
its banks stands the populous and thriving town of Brenham, in Washington 



I36 RICH FARM LANDS TEXAN FOLIAGE. 

county, one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled in the State. The beauty 
of the famous La Bahia prairie has not been exaggerated ; I saw its fertile lands 
where the great oaks stood up like mammoth sentinels ; where the pecan-tree, 
the pride of Texas, and one of the noblest monarchs of the sylvan creation, 
spread his broad boughs ; where the cotton-wood, the red cedar, and the ash shot 
up their noble stems; where the magnolia and the holly swore friendship; where 
the tangled canebrake usurped the soil, and where upon the live oak the grape- 
vine hung lovingly encircling it with delicate leaves and daintiest tendrils. How 
fair, too, were the carefully cultivated lands, hedged in with the Osage orange 
and the rose, the vineyards and the pleasant timber lines along the creeks ! 
What beautiful retreats by the Brazos ! One might fancy himself in the heart of 
the richest farming sections of England. Tobacco, rye, hops, hemp, indigo, 
flax, cotton, corn, wheat and barley, as well as richest grapes, can be profitably 
grown ; deer bound through the forests, wild turkeys stalk in the thickets, and 
grouse and quails hide in the bosquets. The emigrant wagon is a familiar sight 
there, and the wanderers from the poorer Southern States find that this rich tract 
realizes their wildest dreams of Texas. In this section small farms are rapidly 
increasing in number, land being rented to new-comers unable to buy. 

One's senses are soon dulled by satiety. When I first traversed Texas, fresh 
from the white, snow-covered fields of the North, how strange seemed the great 
cypresses, hung with bearded moss ; the tall grasses rustling so uncannily ; the 
swamps, with their rank luxuriance and thousands of querulous frogs ; the clumps 
of live oaks, and the tangled masses of vines ! 

But a winter in the South had familiarized me with all these things, and on 
my return I sought in vain the impressions of my earlier trip. Extraordinary 
rural charms are like the perfume of the jessamine. At first it intoxicates the 
senses, but, as familiarity grows, it ceases to attract attention. Even absence 
will not restore its sweetness and subtlety. 



XIII. 

THE TRUTH ABOUT TEXAS — THE JOURNEY BY STAGE 
TO SAN ANTONIO. 

GALUSHA A. Grow, once speaker of the national House of Representatives, 
and now the energetic and successful manager of a railroad in the Lone 
Star State, has changed the once memorable words, " Go to Texas !" from a 
malediction into a beneficent recommendation. The process was simple : he 
placed the curt phrase at the head of one of those flaming posters which railway 
companies affect, and associated it with such ideas of lovely climate and pros- 
pective prosperity, that people forthwith began to demand if it were indeed true 
that they had for the last twenty years been fiercely dismissing their enemies 
into the very Elysian Fields, instead of hurling them down to Hades. 

The world is beginning to learn something of the fair land which the adven- 
turous Frenchmen of the seventeenth century overran, only to have it wrested 
from them by the cunning and intrigue of the Spaniard ; in which the Fran- 
ciscan friars toiled, proselyting Indians, and building massive garrison missions ; 
which Aaron Burr dreamed of as his empire of the south-west; and into which 
the "Republican" army of the North marched, giving presage of future 
American domination. 

Austin and his brave fellow -colonists rescued Texas from the suicidal 
policy of the Mexican Government, and the younger Austin accepted it as 
his patrimony, elevating it from the degraded and useless condition in which the 
provincial governors had held it. Under his lead, it spurned from its side its 
fellow-slave, Coahuila, and broke its own shackles, throwing them in the 
Mexican tyrant Guerrero's face ; its small but noble band of mighty men 
making the names of San Felipe, of Goliad, of the Alamo, of Washington, of 
San Jacinto, immortal. 

It crushed the might of Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West; it wrested 
its freedom from the hard hands of an unforgiving foe, and maintained it, as an 
isolated republic, commanding the sympathy and respect of the world ; it placed 
the names of Houston, of Travis, of Fannin, of Bowie, of Milam, of Crockett, 
upon the roll of American heroes and faithful soldiers, and brought to the 
United States a marriage- gift of two hundred and thirty- seven thousand square 
miles of fertile land. 

The world is beginning to know something of this gigantic south-western 
commonwealth which can nourish a population of 50,000,000; whose climate 
is as charming as that of Italy ; whose roses bloom and whose birds sing all 



I38 TEXAS AS IT REALLY IS. 

winter long; whose soil can yield the fruits of all climes, and whose noble 
coast-line is broken by rivers which have wandered two thousand miles in 
and out among Texan mountains and over vast Texan plains. It is a region 
of strange contrasts in peoples and places : you step from the civilization 
of the railway junction in Denison to the civilization of Mexico of the seven- 
teenth century in certain sections of San Antonio ; you find black, sticky land 
in Northern Texas, incomparably fertile; and sterile plains, which give the 
cattle but scant living, along the great stretches between the San Antonio 
and the Rio Grande. 

You may ride in one day from odorous, moss-grown forests, where everything 
is of tropic fullness, into a section where the mesquite and chaparral dot the 
gaunt prairie here and there ; or from the sea-loving populations of Galveston 
and her thirty- mile beach, to peoples who have never seen a mast or a wave, and 
whose main idea of water is that it is something difficult to find and agreeable as 
a beverage. 

The State has been much and unduly maligned ; has been made a by- word 
and reproach, whereas it should be a source of pride and congratulation. It has 
had the imperfections of a frontier community, but has thrown off the majority of 
them even while the outer world supposed it to be growing worse and worse. 
Like some unfamiliar fruit supposed to be bitter and nauseous, it has gone on 
ripening in obscurity until, bursting its covering, it stands disclosed a thing of 
passing sweetness, almost beyond price. 

Much of the criticism to which Texas has been subjected has come from peo- 
ple very little acquainted with its actual condition. Border tales have been 
magnified and certified to as literally true. The people of the North and of 
Europe have been told that the native Texan was a walking armament, and that 
his only argument was a pistol-shot or the thrust of a bowie-knife. The Texan 
has been paraded on the English and French stages as a maudlin ruffian, sober 
only in savagery ; and the vulgar gossipings of insincere scribes have been 
allowed to prejudice hundreds of thousands of people. 

Now that the State is bound by iron bands to the United States, now that, 
under good management and with excellent enterprise, it is assuming its proper 
place, the truth should be told. Of course, it will be necessary to say some dis- 
agreeable things; to make severe strictures upon certain people and classes of 
people ; but that is not, by any means, to condemn the State by wholesale or to 
write of it in a hostile spirit. The first impression to be corrected — a very fool- 
ish and inexcusably narrow one, which has, nevertheless, taken strong hold upon 
the popular mind — is, that travel in Texas, for various indefinite reasons, is 
everywhere unsafe. Nothing could be more erroneous ; there is only one section 
where the least danger may be apprehended, and that is vaguely known as the 
''Indian country." Hostile Comanches, Lipans, or predatory Kickapoos might 
rob you of your cherished scalp if you were to venture into their clutches ; but in 
less than three years they will have vanished before the locomotive — or, possibly 
before the legions of Uncle Sam, who has a pronounced mania for removing his 
frontier quite back to the mountains of Mexico. 



THE CHARACTER OF THE TEXAS PEOPLE. 1 39 

Indeed, this apprehension with regard to safety for life and property in Texas 
is all the more inexplicable from the very fact that the great mass of the citizens 
of the State were and are determined to maintain law and order, and to fight with 
bitter persistence the outlaws who have found their way into the country. 

It is true that during the war, and for two years thereafter, things were in 
lamentable condition. Outlaws and murderers infested the high-roads, robbed 
remote hamlets, and enacted jail deliveries. There were a thousand murders per 
year within the State limits ; but at the end of the two years the reconstruction 
government had got well at work, and annihilated the murderers and robbers. 

It is a noteworthy fact, too, that the people then murdered were mainly the 
fellows of the very ruffians who murdered them — shot down in drunken broils, or 
stabbed in consequence of some thievish quarrel. Of course, innocent people 
were occasionally plundered and killed ; but then, as now, most of the men who 
" died with their boots on " were professional scoundrels, of whom the world was 
well rid. 

It may with truth be said that there exists in all of the extreme Southern 
States a class of so-called gentlemen who employ the revolver rather suddenly 
when they fancy themselves offended, sometimes killing, now and then only 
frightening an opponent. These people are not, as yet, treated with sufficient 
rigor in Texan society. There are even instances of men who have killed a num- 
ber of persons and are still considered respectable. The courts do not mete out 
punishment in such cases with proper severity, sometimes readily acquitting 
men who have wantonly and willfully shot their fellow-creatures on the slightest 
provocation. 

A correct summary of the present condition of Texas may, it seems to me, 
be stated as follows : A commonwealth of unlimited resources and with unri- 
valed climate, inhabited by a brave, impulsive, usually courteous people, by no 
means especially bitter on account of the war, who comprise all grades of society, 
from the polished and accomplished scholar, ambassador, and man of large 
means, to the rough, unkempt, semi-barbaric tiller of the soil or herder of cattle, 
who is content with bitter coffee and coarse pork for his sustenance, and with a 
low cabin, surrounded with a scraggy rail fence, for his home. 

The more ambitious and cultured of the native Texans have cordially joined 
with the newly-come Northerners and Europeans in making improvements, in 
toning up society in some places, and toning it down in others ; in endeavoring 
to compass wise legislation with regard to the distribution of lands, and the com- 
plete control of even the remote sections of the State by the usual machinery of 
courts and officials ; and in the binding together and consolidation of the interests 
of the various sections by the rapid increase of railway lines. 

It was a charming morning in April that I climbed to the high box-seat by 
the driver of the San Antonio stage, and sat perched above four sleek and strong 
horses in front of the Raymond House, at Austin, the Texan capital. 

Heavy heat was coming with the growing day ; the hard, white roads glis- 
tened under the fervid sun, and the patches of live oak stood out in bold relief 
against a cloudless sky. The shopkeepers were lolling under their awnings, in 



140 



EN ROUTE FOR SAN ANTONIO. 



lazy enjoyment of the restful morning, and a group of Mexicans, lounging 
by a wall, cast wild glances at us from beneath their broad sombreros and 
their tangled and matted black hair. In the distance, Mount Bonnel showed a 
fragment of its rock- strewn summit, and white stone houses peered from the dark 

green of the foliage, while 
the State House, crowning 
a high knoll, and flanked 
on either side by the Land 
Office and the Governor's 
Mansion, hid from us the 
view of the rich plain, ex- 
tending back to the bases 
of the hills which form an 
amphitheatre in whose 
midst Austin is prettily 
set down. 

Nine inside and three 
outside. "Now, then, 
driver, are you ready? 
Here is your way-bill ; 
here are half-a-dozen mail 
bags ; ballast up carefully, 
or you will have your 

Sunning themselves. — "A group of Mexicans, lounging by a wall." COach Upset !" The driver 

a nut-brown man, handsome and alert withal, clad in blue overalls, velvet 
coat, and black slouch hat, springs lightly into his seat, cracks his long 
whip-lash, and we plunge away toward the steep banks of the Colorado, 
bound for an eighty-mile stage ride to the venerable and picturesque city of 
San Antonio. 

Rattle ! we are at the bank, and must all dismount to walk down the decliv- 
ity, and cross the almost waterless river channel on a pontoon bridge. We toil 
painfully across a sandy waste, and then up the bank on' the other side, turning 
to look at the town behind us, while the horses pant below. 

A cavalcade of hunters passes us, mounted on lithe little horses and grave, 
sure-footed mules, returning toward Austin. The men are brown with the sun, 
and carry rifles poised across their high-peaked Mexican saddles. Their limbs 
are cased in undressed skin leggings, and their heads are covered with broad 
hats, entwined with silver braids. Each man bows courteously, and all canter 
briskly down to the stream. 

Mounting once more to our perches, beside the driver, artist and writer alike 
are inspired by the beauty of the long stretch of dark highway, bordered and 
covered with huge live oaks, or with the wayward mesquite, whose branches are 
a perpetual danger to the heads of outside passengers. 

The driver nervously inspects us ; then lights a cigar, and, in a gentle voice, 
appeals to his horses with : " Git up, ye saddle critturs ! " — evidently a mild 




SCENES BY THE WAY SAN ANTONIO'S LOCATION. 



HI 



reproach. The saddle critturs dash forward at a rapid gait. Each glossy- 
flank is branded with the name by which the animal is known ; and when- 
ever a leader lags or a wheel horse shows a disposition to be skittish, the 
loud voice says, "You Pete!" or "Oh Mary!" and Pete and Mary alike prick 
up their pretty ears with new energy. The driver's tones never rise beyond 
entreaty or derision ; and the animals seem to feel each stricture upon their 
conduct keenly. 

So we hasten on, past pretty farm-houses with neat yards, where four- year- 
old boys are galloping on frisky horses, or driving the cattle or sheep afield ; 
past the suburbs of Austin, and out into the open country, until we have left 
all houses behind, and only encounter from time to time wagons, drawn by 
oxen, and loaded with barrels and boxes, with lumber and iron, toiling at -the 
rate of twenty miles a day toward the West. Behind each of the wagons 
marches a tough little 
horse, neatly saddled ; 
and a forlorn dog with a 
general air of wolfishness 
about him, and showing 
his teeth as we dash 
past, brings up the rear. 

Presently the driver 
turns to us with, "I'm a 
dreadful good hand to 
talk, if ye've got any 
cigars." Then, in 
another breath, " From 
New York, hey ? Ain't 
ye afraid to come away out here alone?" (Implying a scorn for the outside 
impression of Texan travel.) A moment after, in a tone of infinite compassion, 
as if regarding Gotham as a place to be pitied, driver adds : 

" Wal, I s'pose thar are some good souls thar" (confidentially); ".I've hauled 
more 'n two thousand o' them New Yorkers over to San Anton within the last 
year. Heap o' baggage. We told one young feller on the box here, one day, 
lots of Injun stories, just as it was gittin dark. Reckon he was n't much afeared. 
Oh, no!" Suppressed merriment lurking in the handsome brown face. "You 
Pete ! you ain't fit for chasin' Injuns ! Git up ! " 

San Antonio is 2,270 miles from New York by present lines of rail and stage, 
and is situated in one of the garden spots of South-western Texas. To the newly- 
arrived Northerner, Galveston certainly seems the ultima-antipode of Gotham ; 
but once across the Brazos and the Colorado, and well into the fertile plains and 
among the glorious prairies of Western and South-western Texas, the sense of 
remoteness, of utter contrast, is a thousand-fold more impressive. To think, 
while clinging to the swaying stage-seat, that one may journey on in this pleasant 
way for eight hundred miles still within Texan limits, gives, moreover, a grand 
idea of the great State's extent. 




"We encounter wagons drawn by oxen." 



142 A HALT A FORD IMMIGRANTS. 

Whirling thus, hour by hour, away from railroads, from houses, taverns, and 
bridges, and beaver-hatted and silk-bedizened folk, one cannot resist the growing 
feeling that he is in a foreign land, and as he sees the wild-eyed children staring 
at him from the fields, or notes the horseman coursing by, with clang and clatter 
of spur and arms, he has a vague expectation that if addressed it will be in a 
foreign tongue. 

A halt: — at a small stone house, through whose open door one sees a curious 
blending of country-store, farm-house and post-office. Here the mail for the 
back-country is delivered. "Morning, Judge," from a lean by-stander, medita- 
tively chewing tobacco, to an outside passenger. " Got them radical judges 
impeached yet ? Driver, won't you bring me a copy of the Texas Almanac next 
time you come out ? Reckon I kin use it." A drove of pigs curiously inspect 
the open entrance to the store, whereupon two dogs charge them, flank the 
youngest of the swine, and teach them manners at the expense of their ears. 

Lime-flavored water is brought in a tin dipper and passed around ; such of 
the passengers as choose, perfume the vessel with a drop of whiskey. " Wal ! 
sha'n't git ye to San Antonio 'fore this time to-morrow, if ye drink the rivers all 
dry," is the mild remonstrance. As we move off, the driver vouchsafes : 

"Thar was Mose — Judge, you remember Mose; he would n't let no stranger 
talk to him, he wouldn't. Crossest man on^this line; had a right smart o' swear- 
words : used 'em mostly to hosses, tho' ! Had one horse that was ugly, and 
always tied his tail to the trace. Outsides mostly always asked him : ' What do 
you tie that horse's tail to the trace for ? ' You oughter hear Mose answer. 
Took him half an hour to get the swear- words out. One day, a feller from New 
York went over with Mose, and did n't say a word about the horse's tail all the 
way to the relay ; when they got to the unhitching place, Mose offered the New 
Yorker half a dollar — 'Stranger,' he says, 'I reckon you've gin me that worth of 
peace of mind ; you are the first man that never asked me nothing about that 'ar 
critter's tail.'" 

A ford, the sinuous road leading to the edge of a rapidly-rushing streamlet, 
on whose banks, among the white stones, lie the skeletons of cattle perished by 
the wayside ! Buzzards hovering groundward indicate some more recent demise. 
Ah! a poor dog, whose feet no longer wearily plod after the wagon train. The 
collar is gone from his neck, some lonely man having taken it as a remembrance 
of his faithful companion. 

A mocking-bird sings in some hidden nook ; a chaparral cock runs tamely 
before us, fanning the air with his gray plumes, and gazing curiously at the buz- 
zards. An emigrant wagon is lumbering through the shallow, bluish-green 
water ; the children of yonder grim-bearded father are wading behind it : inside, 
the mother lies ill on a dirty mattress. Two old chairs, with pots and kettles, a 
Winchester rifle, a sack of flour, and a roll of canvas, are strung at the wagon's 
back. The horses display their poor old ribs through their hides, and their 
tongues protrude under the intense heat. 

Our steeds splash through the stream. We come upon a Mexican camp, 
where a group of lazy peons, who have wandered across from Mexico, braving 



A MEXICAN CAMP — THE CAMPAGNA, 



143 



danger and death daily, have at last found a safe haven. The dingy father 
sleeps under his little cart. His mules crop the dry grass, tethered near a 
small, filthy tent, wherein reposes an Indian girl, with a cherub-child's head 
resting upon her exquisite arm. A gipsy-looking hag is munching dried meat 
before a little fire where coffee is boiling. 

Now along a rolling prairie, in a route disfigured by what is known as the 
" hog- wallow; " then, up to a range of hills : and O gioja! the matchless beauty 
of a wide expanse of vale below filled with masses of dense foliage, and beyond, 
forest-clad hills peered down upon by a blue, misty range, far away. A com- 
fortable farm-house crowns the hill up which we climb; shepherds are driving 
flocks of sheep afield ; horsemen are mounting and dismounting ; bright-eyed 
maidens flit about the yard, bareheaded and barearmed ; half-naked negro 




"Here and there we pass a hunter's camp." 

children tumble about on the turf, and little white boys on ponies play at 
Comanche. Majestic waves of sunlight flit across the valley; the campagna to 
which we are now coming swims in the delicious effulgence of the perfect Texas 
April noon. Here and there we pass a hunter's camp. We spin forward mer- 
rily, having had plenty of relays of fresh horses, and put the Blanco river behind 
us almost without wetting their hoofs, so low is it ; though in times of freshet it 
holds the whole country round in terror for weeks. 

A halt for dinner, which is served in a long, cool kitchen ; a swart girl stand- 
ing at one end and a swart boy at the other. Each agitates a long stick adorned 
with strips of paper, and thus a breeze is kept up and the flies are driven off. 
Buttermilk, corn-bread, excellent meat, and the inevitable coffee are .the concom- 

10 



144 SAN MARCOS NEW BRAUNFELS. 

itants of the meal. The landlady stares at the paper- currency offered, as only 
gold and silver are known in this section. The farmer comes in from the field 
for his dinner, and his pleasant, homely talk recalls one to America. After all, 
then, this is not a foreign land. " Stage ready ; come, now, if ye want to git 
anywhar to-night ! " 

Onward to the San Marcos, another small, but immensely powerful stream, 
running through rich lands, and passing hard by the prosperous town of San 
Marcos, the shire of a county whose best products are cotton, corn, and sorghum. 
The river, which has its source not far from the town, and near the old home- 
stead of Gen. Burleson, the noted Indian fighter, affords water-power which 
cannot fail to tempt Northern capital some day. Wood and building-stone of 
the best quality are abundant; San Marcos may yet be a second Lawrence or 
Manchester. We pass the court-house and the Coronal Institute ; pass the long 
street lined with pretty dwellings, and ride forward all the hot afternoon towards 
the Guadalupe. 

The fields, in which the corn is already half a foot high, are black ; the soil is 
like fruit-cake. In obscure corners we find little cabins — erected by the Mexi- 
cans who abound along the way. Toward sunset we come upon neat stone 
houses, with quaint German roofs. " Everything Dutch now," ejaculates the 
driver, and indeed we are about to see what German industry and German thrift 
have done for Western Texas. 

The stage rumbles on through the "lane" which extends for miles on either 
side of New Braunfels, bounded by fertile, well-fenced, well- cultivated fields, such 
as the eye of even a New England farmer never rested upon. It is dark as we 
rattle past the cottages ; the German families, mother, father, and the whole 
gamut of children, from four to fourteen, are coming in from work. 

The women have been afield ploughing, with the reins round their necks and 
the plough handles grasped in their strong hands. Yet they are not uncouth or 
ungracious ; their faces are ruddy , their hair, blown backward by the evening 
breeze, falls gracefully about their strong shoulders. Surely, this is better than 
the tenement house in the city ! 

At last we reach the Comal, and crossing its foamy, greenish-blue waters, 
rattle on to New Braunfels, the cheery town which the German Immigration 
Company settled in 1845, an d which is now an orderly and wealthy community 
of 4,000 inhabitants, set down in the midst of a county which has probably 
10,000 residents. 

The Germans were the pioneers in this section, endured many hardships, and 
had many adventures, many battles with the Indians, before they were allowed to 
push forward from New Braunfels and create other settlements. As we enter the 
long main street of the town, the lights from the cottage doors gleam forth 
cheerily. The village maidens are walking two by two with their arms about each 
others' waists, and crooning little melodies, and the men are smoking long pipes 
at the gates. Suddenly we dash up to the hotel, and a pleasant-faced old 
gentleman, in a square silk cap, hastens to welcome us into a bright room, where 
little groups of Germans sit ranged about clean tables, drinking their foaming 



THE COMAL A NIGHT RIDE. 145 

beer from shiniest of glasses. Are we then in Germany ? Nay ; for supper is 
spread in yonder hall, and the new driver whom we took up at the last relay is 
calling upon us, in our English tongue, to make haste. 

New Braunfels bears as many evidences of wealth and prosperity as any town 
in the Middle States. It has always been liberal in sentiment, and for many 
years boasted of having the only free school in Texas. The shrewd Germans 
have taken advantage of the admirable water-power of the Comal and Guadalupe, 
and have established manufactories in the county. 

The Comal, one of the most beautiful streams in Texas, gushes out at the foot 
of a mountain range not far from New Braunfels, from a vast number of springs ; 
and from its sources to its confluence with the Guadalupe, a distance of three 
miles, has forty feet of fall, and mill-sites enough for a regiment of capitalists. 
Indeed it is easy to see that the place will, at some future time, become a great 
manufacturing centre. White labor is easily obtained, and the community is 
peaceful and law-abiding. 

A large cotton factory was established on the Comal some years ago, but was 
destroyed by an exceptionally disastrous tornado in 1869. There are many 
water-mills in the county, all engaged in the manufacture of flour for export via 
the port of Indianola, settled by the same immigration company which founded 
New Braunfels, or via Lavaca. The trees along the river and creek bottoms are 
almost overborne with the mustang grape ; the county abounds in fruit, while 
cotton, corn, and the other cereals are raised in profusion. Irrigation is not 
difficult. 

It is quite dark, and a cool night wind is blowing when we mount once more 
to the coach-top, and settle ourselves for a ride which will last until two in the 
morning. The driver cracks his long whip, and we plunge into the darkness. 
The two great lamps of the coach cast a bright light for twenty feet ahead, and 
we can see little patches of the landscape, beyond which is the infinite darkness 
relieved only here and there by the yellow of camp-fires, or by the fitful gleams 
of the fire- flies. At last we strike across the prairie. The mesquite- trees, which 
we pass every moment, look white and ghostly in the lamplight, and flit by us 
like a legion of restless spirits. Then, too, as the horses trot steadily forward, 
there is the illusion that we are approaching a great city, so like are the innumer- 
able fire-flies to the gaslights of a metropolis. Now we are in a stable-yard, in 
the midst of a clump of mesquite and oak-trees ; the tired horses are unhitched, 
fresh ones replace them, and away we go again over the prairies. Presently the 
architecture changes ; the little houses, dimly seen at the roadside, from time to 
time, are low, flat-roofed, and built of white stone ; there are long stone walls, 
over which foliage scrambles in most picturesque fashion, while, sprinkled in here 
and there, are the shabby Mexican cottages, with thatched roofs and mud floors. 
There is a hint of moonlight as we approach the hills, and we can see the cattle 
in relief against the sky, hundreds of them lying comfortably asleep, or starting 
up as they hear the rattle of the coach, and brandishing their horns or flourishing 
their tails. Faster, faster flit the mesquite ghosts ; faster fly away the oaks and 
the chaparral ; and faster the little streams which we speed across. Now we 



146 



THE ARRIVAL AT SAN ANTONIO. 



mount upon a high table-land, from which we can see, faintly defined in the 
distance, a range of hills, and can catch a glimpse of the beautiful valley at their 
feet. The hours pass rapidly by ; the night breeze is inspiring, and the driver is 
singing little songs; we dash into a white town; pass a huge "corral," inside 




"We pass groups of stone houses." 

which stand blue army wagons drawn up in line; pass groups of stone houses, 
then into a long street, thickly lined with dwellings, set down in the midst of 
delicious gardens ; scent the perfume drifting from the flower-beds ; climb a 
little hill, whirl into a Spanish-looking square, and descend, cramped in limb and 
sore in bone, at the portal of the Menger House, in the good old city of San 
Antonio, the pearl of Texas, 



XIV. 



AMONG THE OLD SPANISH MISSIONS. 

THE great State of Texas is usually spoken of by its inhabitants as divided 
into eight sections — namely, Northern, Eastern, Middle, Western, Ex- 
treme South-western, and North-western Texas, the Mineral Region, and the 
"Pan Handle." This latter section, which embraces more than 20,000 square 
miles, is at present inhabited almost entirely by Indians. The mineral region 
proper, believed to be exceedingly rich in iron and copper ores, comprises 50,000 




"The vast pile of ruins known as the San Jose Mission 



Page 154.] 



square miles. The vast section between the San Antonio river and the Rio 
Grande — as well as the stretch of seven hundred miles of territory between San 
Antonio and El Paso, on the Mexican frontier, is given up to grazing herds of 
cattle, horses, and sheep, to the hardy stock-raiser, and to the predatory Indian 
and Mexican. Across the plains runs the famous "old San Antonio road," which, 
for 150 years, has been the most romantic route upon the western continent. The 
highway between Texas and Mexico, what expeditions of war, of plunder, of 
savage revenge, have traversed it ! What heroic soldiers of liberty have lost their 
lives upon it ! What mean and brutal massacres have been perpetrated along its 
dusty stretches ! What ghostly processions of friar and arquebusier, of sandaled 
Mexican soldier and tawny Comanche ; of broad-hatted, buckskin-breeched vol- 



I48 THE PEOPLE OF SAN ANTONIO. 

unteer for Texan liberty; of gaunt emigrant, or fugitive from justice, with pistols 
at his belt and a Winchester at his saddle ; of Confederate gray and Union blue, 
seem to dance before one's eyes as he rides over it ! The romance of the road 
and of its tributaries is by no means finished ; there is every opportunity for the 
adventurous to throw themselves into the midst of danger even within forty 
miles of "San Anton," as the Texans lovingly call the old town; and sometimes 
in the shape of mounted Indians, the danger comes galloping into the very 
suburbs of San Antonio itself. 

San Antonio is the only town in the United States which has a thoroughly 
European aspect, and, in its older quarters, is even more like some remote and 
obscure town in Spain than like any of the bustling villages of France or Ger- 
many, with which the " grand tour" traveler is familiar. Once arrived in it, and 
safely ensconced among the trees and flowerets on Flores street, or on any of 
the lovely avenues which lead from it into the delicious surrounding country, 
— there seems a barrier let down to shut out the outer world ; the United States 
is as a strange land. 

In San Antonio, too, as in Nantucket, you may hear people speak of " going 
to the States," "the news from the States," etc., with utmost gravity and good 
faith. The interests of the section are not so identified with those of the 
country to which it belongs as to lead to the same intense curiosity about 
American affairs that one finds manifested in Chicago, St. Louis, and even in 
Galveston. People talk more about the cattle- trade, the Mexican thievery 
question, the invasion of Mexico by the French, the prospect of the opening up 
of silver mines, than of the rise and fall of the political mercury; and the general 
government comes in for consideration and criticism only when the frontier 
defenses or the Mexican boundaries are discussed. "What general was that 
down yer with Gin'ral Sherman?" said a man to me at an out-of-the-way town in 
Western Texas. "Reckon that was one o' your Northern gin'rals." As he had no 
interest in following Cabinet changes, he had never heard of Secretary Belknap. 

Although everything which is brought to San Antonio from the outer world 
toils over many miles of stage or wagon transit, the people are well provided 
with literature ; but that does not bring them closer to the United States. 
Nothing but a railroad ever will ; and against the idea of the railroad soon to 
reach them the majority of the elder population rebels. Steaming and snorting 
engines to defile the pure air, and disturb the grand serenity of the vast plains ! 
No, indeed ; not if the Mexicans could have their way, the older Mexicans, the 
apparently immortal old men and women who are preserved in Chili pepper, and 
who, as their American neighbors say, have been taught that they will have 
but short shrift when the railways do come. " It will bring you all sorts of epi- 
demics, and all kinds of noxious diseases," they have been told by those inter- 
ested to prevent the road's building. And this the venerable moneyed Mexicans 
actually consider a valid reason for opposition, since San Antonio now has the 
reputation of being the healthiest town on the American continent. 

The local proverb says, " If you wish to die here, you must go somewhere 
else ;" and, although the logic is a little mixed, it certainly has a fond de verite. 



A SUPERB CLIMATE — SAN ANTONIO'S HISTORY. I49 

For many years consumptives have been straying into San Antonio, apparently 
upon their very last legs, only to find renewed life and vigor in the superb 
climate of Western Texas ; and so certain are consumptives and other invalids to 
be cured in the city and the surrounding region, that retreats and quiet 
residences for people to enshrine themselves in during recovery are going up 
in all quarters. A few of the golden mornings — a few of the restful evenings, 
when the odorous shadows come so gently that one cannot detect their approach 
— and one learns the charm of this delightful corner of the world. 

San Antonio is the cradle of Texan liberty. Its streets and the highways 
leading to it have been drenched with the blood of brave soldiers. Steal out 
with me into the fields this rosy morning, friends, and here, at the head of the 
San Antonio river, on this joyous upland, at the foot of the Guadalupe mount- 
ains whence flow a thousand sweet springs, and overlooking the old town, hear 
a bit about its history and the early struggles of the Texans. 

France was a great gainer for a short time by the fortunate accident which in 
1684 threw De La Salle's fleet into the bay of San Fernando, on the Gulf of 
Mexico, during his voyage from La Rochelle to take possession of the mouths of 
the Mississippi in the name of the king of France. De La Salle virtually opened 
Texas. After he had discovered his error in reckoning, and that he was on new 
ground, he established a fort between Velasco and Matagorda ; but it was soon 
after destroyed, and De La Salle's premature death, at the hands of his quarrel- 
some and cowardly associates, greatly retarded the progress of French discovery. 
But the expedition, and those which followed it, caused great alarm, and as much 
indignation as alarm, at the Court of Spain. A century and a-half was yet to 
elapse ere her feebleness should compel Spain to abandon a conquest whose 
advantages she had so abused ; ere she should see herself driven to give up the 
immense territory which she had held so long. 

Meanwhile De La Salle's expedition caused new activity in Spain ; and in 
1691, a governor "of the States of Coahuila and Texas" was appointed, and 
with a handful of soldiers and friars went out to establish missions and military 
posts. Colonies were planted on the Red river, on the Neches, and along the 
banks of the Guadalupe; but in a few years they died out. Presently other 
efforts were made — the Spaniards meantime keeping up a sharp warfare with the 
Indians, the mission of San Juan Bautista, on the right bank of the Rio Grande, 
three miles from the river, being created a presidio or garrison, and the "old San 
Antonio road" between Texas and Mexico running directly by it. 

Meantime the French were vigorously pushing expeditions forward from the 
settlements along the Louisiana coast ; and so very much in earnest seemed the 
movements of Crozat, the merchant prince, to whom Louis XIV. had ceded 
Louisiana, that the Viceroy of Mexico began anew measures for establishing 
missions and garrisons throughout Texas. And so it happened that in 171 5, 
after a mission had been established among the Adaes Indians, and another, the 
" Dolores," west of the Sabine river, the fort and mission -of San Antonio de 
Valero was located on the right bank of the San Pedro river, about three-fourths 
of a mile from the site of the present Catholic Cathedral in San Antonio of to-day. 



I50 THE FOUNDING OF THE TOWN — THE ALAMO MISSION. 

From this year (17 15) may be said to date the decisive occupancy of Texas 
by Spain, as opposed to France ; she drove out the French wherever found, 
opposed their advances, and finally succeeded in definitely planting fortified 
missions at the principal important points. San Antonio was then known as a 
garrison, and was usually spoken of as the Presidio of Bexar. Indeed, to this 
day the elder Mexicans living in the surrounding country speak of going al 
presidio (to the garrison) whenever they contemplate a visit to San Antonio. 
Texas was then known as the " New Phillippines ;" and San Antonio, with its 
five missions, was one of the four garrisons by which it was protected. 

The Marquis of Casa Fuerte had long believed that this post would be a good 
site for a town, and, having asked the Spanish Government to send emigrants 
there, " thirteen families and two bachelors " (say the ancient town records) 
arrived from the Canary Islands, and settled on the east side of the San Antonio 
river, founding a town which they called San Fernando. To them came sturdy 
Tlascalans from Mexico, and the colonists built a stout little hamlet around the 
great square which to-day is known as the "Plaza of the Constitution," or the 
main square in San Antonio. The town was called San Fernando, in honor of 
Ferdinand, the then king of Spain. It was rough work to be a colonist in those 
days, and the Spaniards, friars, soldiers and all, were very glad to get into the 
great square at night, close the entrance with green hides, set their sentinels on 
the roofs of the flat houses, and, trembling lest the sound of the war-whoop of 
the terrible Apaches and Comanches should startle their slumbers, catch a little 
repose. These Apaches and Comanches overran in those days the country 
between San Antonio and Santa Fe, and would swoop down upon the infant 
settlement from their stronghold in the pass of Bandera. They swarmed in the 
Guadalupe mountains, where even now they come in the full of the moon, search- 
ing for horses, as their ancestors did. 

In due time, there was a town on either side of the San Antonio river, each 
with its mission and attendant garrison. Around the mission of the "Alamo" 
had clustered a little garrison and village. This mission church, whose history is 
so romantic, was first founded in 1703, in the Rio Grande valley, by Franciscans 
from Queretaro, under the invocation of San Francisco de Solano ; but, water 
being scarce, was moved back and forth until 1718, when, 

" Borne, like Loretto's chapel, thro' the air," 

it migrated to the west bank of the San Pedro river, and remained in that vicinity 
until, in 1744, it was removed to the high plateau on the east side of the San 
Antonio, and the foundations of the Church of the. Alamo were laid on the very 
ground where, ninety years after, Travis and his braves fell as only heroes fall. 

The mission was known, until 1783, as San Antonio de Valero, in honor of 
the Marquis of Valero, the then Viceroy of "New Spain." The town below the 
river retained its name of San Antonio de Bexar. 

The missions built up around San Antonio were named respectively La 
Purissima Concepcion de Acuna, San Juan Campitran, San Francisco de Assissis, 
and San Jose. The Franciscans, completely estranged from all the ordinary cares 



THE FRANCISCANS THE MISSIONS ESTABLISHED. 



151 



and passions of the world by the vows of their order, gave themselves heartily to 
their work, and vigorously employed the soldiers allotted them by the Govern- 
ment in catching Indians, whom they undertook to civilize. The missions were 
fortified convent-churches, built in massive and enduring form, and surrounded 
by high walls, so thick and strong that they could resist all Indian attacks. 
Within these walls the converted Indians and the missionaries and soldiers 
gathered whenever a sentinel gave the alarm ; and the brawny friars joined with 
the men-at-arms in fiercely defending the stations where the cross had been 
planted. The Indians who were induced to settle in the vicinity of the Francis- 
cans, and submit to the religious and industrial training which the friars had 
prepared for them, were rarely guilty of treachery, and submitted to all the 
whippings which Mother Church thought good for them. Barefooted, and clad 
in coarse woolen robes, with the penitential scourge about their waists, the priests 
wandered among the Indians at the missions, learned their language, and enforced 
chastity, temperance and obedience. Inside the square which the mission build- 
ings formed were the dwellings allotted both the soldiers and the Indians — the 
savages chafing under this restraint, although they could not doubt the motives 
of the good fathers in restraining them. But they toiled well in the fields, 
went meekly to catechism, and were locked up at night, lest they should be led 
into temptation. Whenever the converts rebelled, there were soldiers enough at 
hand to subdue them ; and the commander of the church garrison was a kind 
of absolute potentate, who made any and every disposition he pleased of a con- 
vert's life and property. 

In 1729, the right reverend fathers forming the college of Santa Cruz of 
Queretaro, were authorized to found three missions on the river San Marcos ; 
and, in 1730, a superior order from the Marquis of Casa Fuerte authorized the 
foundation of these missions upon the river San Antonio, under certain conditions 
as to their distance from the San Antonio garrison. The result was that before 
1780, four superb mission 
edifices had been reared, at 
short distances from each 
other, and not far from the 
beautiful San Antonio river. 

On the 5th of March, 173 1, 
the foundations, of • La Puris- 
sima Concepcion de Acuna 
were laid, and, after many 
vicissitudes and escapes from 
imminent destruction, it was 
completed in 1752. For 
twenty-one years Indians and 
friars had toiled upon one of 
the noblest churches ever 
erected by Catholics in Amer- 



ica. To-day it is a ruin, de- 




The old Concepcion Mission near San Antonio — Texas. 



152 A VISIT TO THE CONCEPCION MISSION. 

serted save by an humble German family, who exhibit the time-honored walls 
to visitors, and till the lands in the vicinity. The San jose mission, in all 
respects the finest, was completed in 1771; that of San Juan in 1746; and 
the "Espada" in 1780. 

As the communities clustered about these missions grew, so grew San 
Antonio ; as they suffered, so it suffered in protecting them. The same Indians 
who cantered up to the town-gates did not fail to offer some menace to the mis- 
sions before returning to their mountain fastnesses. In 1758, they went farther, 
for they assaulted the mission which had been established at San Saba. Pastors 
and their flocks, as well as the guardian soldiery, were sacrificed. Swarms of the 
savages surrounded the mission, and the wonderfully rich silver mines which had 
been developed near it, and not a Spaniard was left alive to bear the news of the 
dreadful massacre to his trembling comrades at the other missions. Some day 
the San Saba mines will be re-opened ; but their exact location has been long 
lost to the knowledge of Europeans or Mexicans, and no Indian will point the 
way to them. 

It was sunset, on a beautiful April evening, when I first climbed to the roof 
of the Concepcion mission. As the day had been heated and dusty in town, I 
was glad, toward evening, to steal away down the lovely road ; past the dense 
groves and perfumed thickets, along the route which wound among trees and 
flowers, and fertile fields watered by long canals ; past quiet cool yards, in whose 
shaded seclusion I could catch glimpses of charming cottages and farm-houses, 
where rosy Germans or lean Americans sat literally under their own " vine and 
fig-tree." 

The carriage rolled suddenly through a ford in the deep, swift stream, came 
out upon a stretch of open field, and at a distance I saw, peering above some 
graceful trees, the twin towers of Concepcion — saw them with a thrill of joy at 
their beauty and grandeur, just as hundreds of weary travelers across the great 
plains had doubtless seen them a century ago. In those days they were a 
welcome sight, for they guaranteed comparative security in a land where nothing 
was absolutely certain, save death. Approaching, I could see that the towers 
arose from a massive church of grayish stone, once highly ornate and rich in 
sculpture and carving, but now much dilapidated. The portal was decayed ; the 
carvings and decorations were obscure; a Spanish inscription told of the founding 
of the mission. A group of awe-struck girls lingered about the door- way as 
an old man rehearsed some legend of the place. 

The edifice bore here and there hints of the Moorish spirit, the tendency to 
the arch and vault which one sees so much in Spanish architecture. The great 
dome, sprung lightly over the main hall of the church, was a marvel of precision 
and beauty. In front, jutting out at the right hand, a long wall now fallen into 
decay showed the nature of the mission's original defenses. This wall was of 
enormous thickness, and the half-ruined dwellings in its sides are still visible. 

As I wandered about the venerable structure, the gray walls were bathed in 
the golden light of the fervid Southern sunset ; numberless doves hovered in and 
out of the grand towers; lizards crawled at the walls' base; countless thousands 



A VISION OF THE PAST ON THE TOWERS. I 53 

of grasshoppers flashing in the air, nestled on the mission's sides ; the stone cross 
between the twin towers stood up black against the sky. Curious parapets along 
the roof, contrived at once for ornament and shelter, showed loop-holes for mus- 
kets. There were mysterious entrances in the rear, and the stone threw a dark 
shadow upon the short, sparse, sun-dried grass. I tried to call up the mission 
fort as it was a century ago, surrounded with smiling fields, cultivated by patient 
Indians ; with soldiers at their posts, diligently guarding the approaches ; with 
the old friars in their coarse robes, building and teaching, and praying and 
scourging themselves and the Indians. I pictured to myself a cavalcade arriving 
at sunset from a weary journey; men-at-arms, and gayly-costumed cavaliers 
entering the gateway; the clatter of swords and the click of musket- locks; the 
echoes of the evening hymn from the resounding vault of the cathedral; — but 
the Present, in the shape of a rail-fence and four excitable dogs anxiously 
peering at me from behind it, would obtrude itself, so I gave meditation the 
good-by, and asked of the family the way to the roof. 

The barefooted German maiden, naive and bashful, seemed strangely out of 
place in the shadows of the mission. I wandered through the kitchen, an old 
nook in the wall, and venturing behind the heels of half a dozen mules stabled in 
a niche of the sanctuary, mounted a crazy ladder leading to the belfry window. 

Getting in at the huge opening, I startled the doves, who flew angrily away, 
and then clinging to the wall on one side, I climbed still another flight of stone 
steps, and emerged on the roof. A giant piece of masonry, my masters of to- 
day ! You can certainly do but little better than did the poor friars and Indians 
a century ago. Being built of the soft stone of the country, the ruin has crum- 
bled in many places; but it looks as if it might still last for a century. For 
miles around, the country is naked, save for its straggling growth of mesquite, 
of cactus, of chaparral ; the forest .has never reasserted itself since the fathers 
cultivated the fields ; and one can very readily trace the ancient limits. 

The grant of the mission of Concepcion was about the first by the Spanish 
Government in Texas of which there is any record. In March of 1731 the 
captain commanding at San Antonio went to the newly allotted mission grounds, 
kindly greeted the Indians who had decided to settle there, and caused the chief 
of the tribe to go about over the ceded lands, to pull up weeds, turn over stones, 
and go through all the traditional ceremonials of possession. The same formali- 
ties were observed in founding all the missions near San Antonio ; the transfer of 
the lands being made to the Indians, because the Franciscans, on account of their 
vows, could hold no worldly estate. 

We Americans of the present should lean rather kindly toward these old 
Franciscans, for they were largely instrumental in the work of freeing Texas 
from the yoke of Spanish and Mexican tyranny. As priests, they were too 
human and sympathetic to enjoy or sympathize with the brutal policy of Spain ; 
and as sensible men, they had Democratic leanings, doubtless enhanced by the 
Spartan plainness in which they lived. 

The various internal troubles undergone by Spain early in this century had 
only served to make her more arrogant toward her colonies, and a large party in 



154 FIGHTS WITH THE SPANIARDS THE SAN JOSE MISSION. 

them was anxious to revolt. At this time there were few Americans in the ter- 
ritory. Now and then the agents of Wilkinson and Bufr ran through it, 
endeavoring to perfect designs for their new South-western Empire ; but, besides 
these ambitious schemers, only desperadoes from the United States entered 
Texas. 

In 1 813, however, Augustus W. Magee, a lieutenant in the American army, 
undertook, in conjunction with a Mexican revolutionist, to conquer Texas to the 
Rio Grande, with a view to annexing it to America or Mexico, as circumstances 
should dictate. He resigned his commission and plunged headlong into the 
invasion, bringing to it many men and much courage, and fighting a good fight 
at Nacogdoches ; but, finally contemplating a retreat, and unable to carry his men 
with him in his plans, he is generally believed to have ended his life by his own 
hands. 

A short time thereafter, the invading Americans and the revolting 
Mexicans arrived before San Antonio, and attacked the city at once. General 
Salcedo, the Spaniard commanding, valiantly defended it ; but the Americans and 
Mexicans won, and as the Indians from the missions had joined in, but few 
prisoners were taken, more than 1,000 Spaniards being killed and wounded. 
Salcedo and a number of noted Spanish officials were brutally murdered. 

A few days later, the Americans and Mexicans were attacked by other 
Spanish forces, whom they repulsed with great slaughter. But a third Spanish 
force was sent to San Antonio, and 4,000 men gave battle to 850 Americans and 
twice as many Mexicans, composing the " Republican Army of the North," near 
the Medina river. The Spaniards were victorious, and all of the Americans but 
ninety-three were massacred. A large number of the Americans were shot on 
the San Antonio road, their cruel captors seating them by tens on timbers placed 
over newly-dug graves, and thus despatching them. This terrible massacre was 
known as the "battle of the Medina." Then the brave old town of San Antonio 
suffered the vengeance of the Spanish authorities. Seven hundred of its best 
citizens were imprisoned, and 500 of the wives and daughters of the patriots 
were thrown into filthy dungeons. 

From that time forth the history of San Antonio was one of blood and 
battle, of siege and slaughter. The Americans, who, in a reckless manner, had 
given their blood for Texan freedom, were henceforth to act from the simpler 
motive of self-defense. 

The vast pile of ruins known as the San Jose Mission stands in the midst of 
the plain about four miles westward from San Antonio. Mute, mighty and pass- 
ing beautiful, it is rapidly decaying. 

The Catholic church in Texas, to whom the missions and the mission lands 
now belong, is too poor to attempt the restoration of this superb edifice which 
one of the most famous of Parisian architects, in a recent tour through this 
country, pronounced the finest piece of architecture in the United States. San 
Jose has more claims to consideration than have the other missions, as the king 
of Spain sent an architect of rare ability to superintend its erection. This 
architect, Huizar, finally settled in Texas, where his descendants still live. 



THE MEXICAN FAMILY AT THE SAN JOSE MISSION. 



155 




It is impossible to paint in words the grand effect of this imposing yellowish- 
gray structure, with its belfry, its long ranges of walls with vaulted archways, its 
rich and quaintly carved windows, its winding stairways, its shaded aisles, rearing 
itself from the parched lands. As our party entered the rear archways an old, 

sun-dried Mexican approached, and in a 
weak voice invited us to enter the church. 
The old man and his bronzed wife had 
placed their household goods in the in- 
terior of the edifice ; and in the outer 
porch dried beef was hung over the 
images of the saints. An umbrella and 
candlestick graced the christening font. 
Lighting a corn-shuck cigarette, the old 
man lay down on one of the beds with a 
moan, for he was a confirmed invalid. 
We climbed to the tower, but speedily 
came down again, as the great dome fell 
in last year, and the roof is no longer 
considered safe. 

Returning to the shade, the Mexican 
An old window in the San jos6 Mission. woman, clad in a single coarse garment, 

her hair falling not ungracefully about a face which, although she must have been 
fifty, seemed still young, served us with water in a gourd, and then seated 
herself on the ground with the hens affectionately picking about her. Was she 
born at the mission ? we asked. No, senor ; but in San Fernando. And where 
had she spent her youth ? In Piedras Negras, senor. And did she not fear the 
roof of the old mission might some day fall and crush her ? Who knows, senor, 
she answered, ambiguously ; giving that vague shake 
of the head by which both Spaniards and Mexicans 
so accurately express profound unconcern. In the 
shade of some of the great walls were little stone 
cabins, in which lived other Mexican families. 
Bronzed children were running about in the sun, and 
bronzed fathers were working lazily in the field. In 
the distance, in any direction — chaparral, — mesquite, 
— cactus, — short, burned grass, and the same pros- 
pect all the way to the Rio Grande. 

A sun-swept, sun - burnished land ; a land of 
mirages, and long, wearying distances without water ; 
a land of mysterious clumps of foliage, inviting to 
ambush ; where soldiers are always chasing maraud- 
ing savages whom they rarely catch, and where the 
Mexican and the Indian together hunt the cattle of 
the "Gringo;" where little towns cluster trustingly around rough fortresses; 
where the lonely "ranch" is defended by the brave settler with his "Win- 




'An umbrella and candlestick graced 
the christening font." 



156 



SAN JUAN THE ESPADA CONSIDERANT'S HOUSE. 



Chester;" where millions of cattle and thousands of horses and sheep roam 
fancy free from year to year, their owners only now and then riding in among 
them to secure the increase ; — that is the beyond. 

The San Juan mission, a little beyond the San Antonio river, some three or 
four miles farther down, like the Espada, which stands upon the bend in the 
river still below, is but a ruin. In its day it was very large, and many families 
lived within its bounds. Now there is little to be seen, except a small chapel 
and the ruins of the huge walls. A few families live among the debris, and 
there is even a " San Juan Mission Store." 

The scene about the humble abodes of the Mexicans, residing in or near 
these missions, is very uniform. There is a rude water-cart near the door; a few 
pigs run about the premises, and a hairless Mexican dog watches them ; two or 
three men, squatted on their haunches, sit blinking in the sun. No one ever 
seems to do any work ; though the Mexicans about San Antonio have a good 
reputation as laborers. 




"The comfortable country-house so long occupied by Victor Considerant. " 

It was at the Concepcion mission that the patriot army of Texas assembled in 
1835, after the capture of Goliad; and it was along the river bottom and in the 
timber by the river, that a battle was fought in which the Mexicans received 
severe treatment. 

On the river road from San Antonio to Concepcion stands the comfortable 
country-house so long occupied by Victor Considerant, the French free-thinker 
and socialist. Considerant, after his ineffectual attempt to found a community 
of the Fourier type in Texas, lived tranquilly with his family near the old 
mission for many years, going to San Antonio now and then for society, and 
occupying his leisure with literary work. A strange man, strongly fixed in his 
beliefs and prejudices, he was not thoroughly understood, though universally 
respected by the Texans who met him. 



XV. 



THE PEARL OF THE SOUTH-WEST, 








n 



PiAN Antonio is watered by two beautiful streams, the San Antonio and the 
O San Pedro, the former running directly through the town's centre. Its 
bluish current flows in a narrow but .^sse^BIEBfcite^ 

picturesque channel between bold and 
rugged banks in some places, and 
sloping borders in others, and is every- 
where overhung with delicate group- 
ings of foliage. It passes under bridges, 
by arbors and bath-houses ; by flights 
of stone steps leading up into cool, cozy 
houses, as the stairways lead from 
Venetian canals ; past little lawns, 
where the San Antonian loafs at his 
ease at midday; and on through sweet 
fields, full of a wealth of blossoms. 
Nowhere, however, is it so supremely 
beautiful as at its source, on the high 
plateau at the foot of the Guadalupe 
range, where it breaks out from a fine 
spring, and shapes itself at once into a 
beautiful stream. Around the natural 
park of several hundred acres which 
lies along the base of the mountains, Mr. Brackenridge, the banker, who pur- 
chased the estate, has thrown a protecting wall enclosing a park which an 

English duke might covet. The 
stream is a delicious poem written 
in water on the loveliest of river- 
beds, from which mosses, ferns, 
dreamiest green and faintest crimson, 
rich opalescent and strong golden 
hues, peep out. Every few rods there 
is a waterscape in miniature — an 
apotheosis of color. Noble pecans, 
grand oaks, lofty ashes, shade the 
stream, which flows down toward a 
quarry a little above the town, where 

The Source of the San Antonio River. it again forms 3, picture SUch aS Only 




The San Antonio River — "Its bluish current flows in a 
narrow but picturesque channel." 




158 



SAN PEDRO SPRINGS. 



the Marne at St. Maur, or the Seine at Marly can rival. To the people of San 
Antonio it is a perpetual delight, a constant treasure, of which they speak almost 
reverently. The San Pedro is commonly known as a creek, but has many a 
beautiful nook along its banks; and in one of them, called "San Pedro Springs," 

the Germans have estab- 
lished their beer gardens. 
There, in the long Sun- 
day afternoons, hundreds 
of families are gathered, 
drinking beer, listening to 
music and singing, play- 
ing with the fawns, or 
gazing into the beer gar- 
den and the den of the 
Mexican panther. There, 
too, the Turnverein takes 
its exercise; and in a long 
hall, dozens of children 
waltz, under the direction 
of a gray-haired old pro- 
fessor, while two specta- 
cled masters of the violin 

San Pedro Springs— "The Germans have established their beer gardens." make music. This is the 

Sunday rendezvous of great numbers of the citizens of San Antonio, Germans 
and Americans, and is as merry, as free from vulgarity or quarreling, as any beer 
garden in Dresden. The German element has been of incalculable value to 
Western Texas, and especially to San Antonio. It has aided much in building 





'Every few rods there is a waterscape in miniature." [Page 157.] 



THE GERMANS FREE SPEECH IN TEXAS, 



159 



up the material interests of the whole section ; has very largely increased the 
trade of the city ; has brought with it conservatism and good sense in manners, 
so that even a frontier town, eighty miles from any railroad, and not more than 
thirty miles from Indians, 
has all the grace and deco- 
rum of older societies. The 
German was a good element, 
too, when the trying issues 
of the last war came ; and 
was unwavering in its loy- 
alty. The Germans suffered 
much, and many were driven 
out, losing property and 
money; hundreds were 
slaughtered in trying to es- 
cape to Mexico, or into the 
North-west; there were 
shameful massacres; but 
they were not to be fright- 
ened, and they held to their 
opinions, although often 
obliged to conceal them. 
Texas is a changed place 
indeed to the people who 
were afraid to express their 
views before the war. As a 
gentleman in San Antonio 
said to me, " It was like living in an asylum where every one was crazy on one 
especial subject; you never knew when dangerous paroxysms were about to 
begin." The Texas of twelve years ago, when it was dangerous for a man to 

be seen reading the 
New York Tribune, and 
critically perilous for 
him to be civil to a 
slave, has passed away, 
and the Texans them- 
selves are glad that 
they have awakened 
from their dream of 
patriarchal aristocracy, 
which placed such a 
check upon the devel- 
opment of the State. 
The Germans have set- 
tled several thriving 




"The river passes under bridges, by arbors and bath-houses." [Page 157.] 




The Ursuline Convent — San Antonio. [Page 161.] 



II 



i6o 



TRADE BANKS RAILROADS THE PLAZAS. 



places west of San Antonio, the most noted of which is Fredericksburg. 
German and Jewish names are over the doors of certainly more than half the 
business houses in San Antonio ; and German or Hebrew talent conducts many 
vast establishments which have trade with the surrounding country, or with 
Mexico. 

San Antonio has so long been a depot for military supplies for all the forts on 
the south-western frontier, and for the Mexican States this side of the Sierra 
Madre, that some of the merchants are not in favor of the advent of railroads, 
fearing that with them trade will move beyond the venerable city, and forgetting 
that even in that event there will be ample compensating advantages. The 
sooner Western Texas has railroads, the sooner will the Indian and Mexican 
difficulties be settled ; the sooner will all the available rich lands be taken up. 

Even now the business 
done by means of the 
slow wagon trains, which 
can at best only make 
twenty miles per day, is 
enormous, amounting to 
many millions yearly. 
What will it be when rail- 
roads penetrate to the now 
untamed frontiers? Many 
of the appliances of civ- 
ilization are fast reaching 
Western Texas for the first 
time. San Antonio now 
has four prosperous banks, 
— she had none before the 
war, — gas-lights, two daily 
papers, and a weekly for 
the Germans; how can she 
avoid railroads ? 

Three lines are at present pointed directly at the antique city ; the Galveston, 
Harrisburg and San Antonio railroad, nearly completed ; the Gulf, Western 
Texas and Pacific railroad, which at present extends from Indianola to Victoria, 
and has been graded to Cuero, thirty miles beyond Victoria ; and the Interna- 
tional railroad, which contemplates touching both Austin and San Antonio, 
thus opening a through line to Longview, in Northern Texas, and south-west- 
ward to Mazatlan on the Pacific, with a branch to the city of Mexico. There is 
not much probability that the last line will be finished to San Antonio, at least 
for many years. 

The plazas, or public squares of San Antonio, merit special attention. The 
four principal ones are the Alamo, the Constitution, the Military, and Travis. 
The latter is a handsome grass-grown common surrounded by pretty residences, 
some of them fronting upon charming lawns and gardens ; a stone church is to 




St. Mary's Church— San Antonio. [Page 161.] 



SAN FERNANDO CHURCH "LAREDITO." 



161 



be erected there by the Episcopalians. The Ursuline Convent and St. Mary's 
Church are among the noticeable Catholic edifices of the town. 

The old church of San Fernando is now removed from the " Plaza of the 
Constitution," or rather is enshrined within a new and imposing edifice, built of 
the white stone of 
the section. The 
Constitution plaza 
is the original gar- 
rison square of San 
Fernando, and 
streets lead out 
from it into the 
open country, the 
Military plaza, and 
the main part of 
the town. The 

Military plaza is surrounded by storehouses and shops, and is always filled 
with wagon teams and their picturesque and ragged drivers. From thence 
it is only a few steps to one of the Mexican quarters of the town, sometimes 
called "Laredito." There the life of the eighteenth century still prevails, 
without taint of modernism. Wandering along the unpaved street in the 
evening, one finds the doors of all the Mexican cottages open, and has only 
to enter and demand supper to be instantly served ; for the Mexican has 
learned to turn American curiosity about his cookery to account. Entering 




A Mexican Hovel. Page 162 ] 




# ' /V ir53*pI 



The Military Plaza — San Antonio 



l62 



A MEXICAN SUPPER FLORES STREET. 



one of these hovels, you will find a long, rough table with wooden benches 
about it ; a single candlestick dimly sending its light into the dark recesses 
of the unceiled roof; a hard earth- floor, in which the fowls are busily bestowing 
themselves for sleep ; a few dishes arranged on the table, and glasses and 
coffee-cups beside them. The fat, tawny Mexican materfamilias will place 
before you various savory compounds, swimming in fiery pepper, which biteth 
like a serpent ; and the tortilla, a smoking hot cake, thin as a shaving, and 
about as eatable, is the substitute for bread. This meal, with bitterest of coffee 
to wash it down, and dulcet Spanish talked by your neighbors at table for dessert, 
will be an event in your gastronomic experience. You will see many Americans 
scattered along at the tables in the little houses in Laredito ; even where 
I went there was a large party of the curious, ciceroned by one of the oldest 
and most respected of San Antonio's citizens, "Don Juan" Twohig, the wealthy 




"The Mexicans slowly saw and carve the great stones." 

Irish banker, who was sixty-five years old that very day, but rolled tortillas as 
heartily as when a sturdy youth, and was as gay as when, a gallant revolutionist, 
he beguiled the hours of captivity in the Castle of Perote, where the cruel 
Mexicans had sent him. 

The residences on Flores street are all completely embowered in shrubbery, and 
many of them are intrinsically fine. There are few wooden structures in the city. 
The solid architecture of previous centuries prevails. Putting up a house is a 
work of time ; the Mexicans slowly saw and carve the great stones ; but the work 
is solid when completed, and fire-proof. Most of the houses and blocks in Com- 
merce and other principal streets are two stories high — sometimes three — and 
there are some fine shops — one or two of them being veritable museums of traffic. 

It is from these shops that the assortments are made up which toil across the 
plains to the garrisons and to Mexico ; and a wagon-train, loaded with a " varied 



MEXICAN HOUSES THE ALAMO. 



I63 



assortment," contains almost everything known in trade. Through the narrow 
streets every day clatter the mule-teams, their tattered and dirty-clothed negro 
drivers shouting frantically at them as they drag civilized appliances toward 
Mexico. These wagoners lead a wild life of almost constant danger and adven- 
ture, but they are fascinated with it, and can rarely be induced to give it up. 

The Mexicans monopolize a corner of the town, which has won the sobriquet 
of "Chihuahua." It is a picturesque collection of hovels, built of logs, stones, 




"The elder women wash clothes by the brookside." 

and dried mud, and thatched with brush or straw. Little gardens are laid out in 
front of the houses, some of which are no larger than a sentry-box, and naked 
children play in the primitive streets. Young girls, bold-eyed and beautiful, 
gayly dressed, and with shawls thrown lightly over their superb heads, saunter 
idly about, gossiping, or staring saucily at strangers ; the elder women wash 
clothes by the brookside. The men seem to be perpetually waiting for some one 
to come and feed them. They wander about in the most purposeless fashion, 
and one is tempted to think them on the look-out for a chance to rob or murder ; 
yet they are, on the contrary, quite inoffensive. "Chihuahua" and "Laredito" 
are nooks that one would never suspect could exist on American soil. But 
the Mexican is hard-headed, and terribly prejudiced ; he cannot be made to 
see that his slow, primitive ways, his filth and lack of comfort, are not better 
than the frugal decency and careful home management of the Germans and 
Americans who surround him. 

The Alamo is the shrine to which every pilgrim to this strange corner of 
America must do utmost reverence. It is venerable as mission church and fort- 
ress, and was so baptized in blood that it is world-famous. The terse inscription 
on the Alamo monument, in the porch of the capitol at Austin, " Thermopylce had 
her messenger of death; tlie Alamo had none/" indicates the reverence in 
which the ruins are held by Texans. There is now but little left of the original 
edifice. The portion still standing is used as a Government storehouse; and 
the place where Travis and his immortals fell, which should be the site of a fine 
monument, is a station for the mule and ox-teams waiting to receive stores. 



164 



THE STRUGGLE FOR TEXAN INDEPENDENCE. 



It was a noteworthy struggle which led to the massacre at the Alamo, and 
thence to Texan independence. Moses and Stephen F. Austin, father and son, 
struggled through a dreary period of colonization from 1821 until 1836. The 
father died before he had succeeded in availing himself, to any extent, of the 
hesitating permission he had received from the Spaniards to introduce Americans 
into Texas ; but his son took that permission as his patrimony, and went at the 
work with a will. 

Stephen Austin was obliged to brave a thousand dangers in founding his first 
colony on the banks of the Brazos; but the colony grew, and acquired a steadiness 
and prosperity, even while the adjacent Mexican States were undergoing twenty 
revolutions. The time, however, came, and speedily, when the Government of 
Mexico perceived that the two races were radically antagonistic, and that Amer- 
ican activity would soon conquer the whole territory, unless force were opposed to 
it. So, with the usual blindness of despotism, Guerrero, the weak and despi- 
cable tyrant, began hostilities against the Americans, and detachments of soldiers 
crept in upon the colonists, occupying various posts, under one pretext or 
another, until the colonists saw through the ruse, and openly defied the crafty 
invaders. 

Guerrero continued provocative measures ; freeing slaves throughout Mexico, 
and thus violating a treaty made with the American colonists ; and at last the 
Mexican Congress forbade any more Americans to enter Texas. 

Then came the thunder-storm ! The colonists sent commissioners to com- 
plain to the Mexican Government of their ill-treatment. These commissioners 
were imprisoned and abused, and the colonists flew to arms — took the citadel of 
Anahuac — took other fortresses and held them — released their commissioners — 
repudiated Mexico — met in convention at San Felipe, in 1832, and drew up a 
constitution under which they desired to live. Stephen Austin agreed to present 




Mexican types in San Antonio. 



THE REVOLT AT SAN JACINTO — SfEGE OF THE ALAMO. 



165 




The remnant of the old fort of the Alamo. 1 



it to the parent government in the city of Mexico, but when he reached that, 
place he was thrown into prison. This and other odious tyrannies of Santa 
Anna, the new ruler and liberator of Mexico, opened the way to the Alamo, to 
San Jacinto, and to inde- 
pendence. It was a bloody 
path, but bravely trod ! 
There were giants in those 
days, men who gave their 
lives cheerfully, men who 
held death in contempt. 
Such men were Austin, 
Houston, Travis, Fannin, 
and Milam. 

The final struggle be- 
tween Santa Anna, dictator 
of Mexico, and the Texan- 
American army began in 
1834. It was a clever pre- 
text which brought about the real war. The Mexican governor of Coahuila, 
the province allied to Texas, had, in order to meet his expenses, proposed the 
sale of lands in Texas. 

Numerous speculators presented themselves ; but they were all Americans, 
and when this became known, the Mexican Government refused to ratify the gov- 
ernor's action. The governor insisted ; troops were sent into Coahuila to expel 
the rebel Legislature which had voted the land measure, and the Texan- 
Americans found themselves, as well as their neighbors, in danger of invasion. 
They could wait no longer; they raised the standard of revolt on the plains of 
San Jacinto, August 16, 1835 ; and as soon as the news of the rebellion 
came to Mexican ears, General Cos, by Santa Anna's orders, sat down 
before San Antonio, the rebellious capital, to starve it into submission. There 
was fighting everywhere — at Goliad, at Gonzales, in all the towns, and 
around them. 

General Cos took San Antonio; was besieged in it; had to give it up to 
brave Ben Milam and the "three hundred men who were ready to die;" and, a 
little time after, the people of Texas, assembled in convention at Washington, on 
the Brazos river, enthusiastically voted the declaration of the absolute indepen- 
dence of Texas. So Santa Anna, with three army corps, began the third siege 
of San Antonio. 

As you see the remnant of the old fort of the Alamo now, its battered walls 
looming up without picturesque effect against the brilliant sky, and the clouds of 
dust which the muleteers and their teams stir up, half hiding it — perhaps it does 
not seem to you like a grand historic memorial. Indeed it is not so grand as in 
its old days, when, as a church, standing proudly under the shade of the noble 
cottonwood trees, it was the cynosure of every eye. It has fallen much into 
decay, and the Government, which would use Washington's tomb for a store- 



l66 HOW TRAVIS AND HIS MEN DIED. 

house, rather than build a proper one, if Mount Vernon were a military depot, 
has cumbered it with boxes and barrels. 

But you must picture the old fort as it was on Sunday, the 6th of March, 
1836, when Texas was a young and war-ridden republic. Santa Anna, with an 
overwhelming force of infantry, had hemmed in and forced to retreat into the 
fort a little band of one hundred and forty or fifty men, commanded by Lieu- 
tenant-Colonel Travis. In those days the fort extended over two or three acres. 

A thousand men would hardly have been sufficient to man the defenses. It 
was a capacious structure, with chapel, long stone barracks, barrier walls, and 
intrenchments, fortified with cannon. The barracks were loop-holed, and the 
doors were barricaded with semicircular parapets, made of double curtains of 
hides filled with earth. The walls were so tremendously thick and strong that 
batteries playing upon them night and day produced but little effect. 

It was a troublous time for the new republic ; the United States had given 
sympathy, but no aid ; the Mexican troops were ten times as numerous as were 
the patriot armies ; terrible struggles against the enemy had been made at 
Goliad, and at other places, but in vain ; all hope of succor was cut off from the 
soldiers in the Alamo, although Houston's little army was doing its best to rally. 
Fannin was desperately awaiting the attack upon Goliad. The Alamo and its 
defenders were left alone, to the mercy of the "Napoleon of the West." 

But Lieutenant- Colonel Travis and the little garrison had made up their 
minds. There was but one idea of duty in the souls of these men. Bowie and 
Crockett and Bonham, and those noble volunteers who had succeeded in making 
their way into the fort from the town of Gonzales — one hundred and eighty- 
eight souls in all, say some chroniclers, — ■ resolved to defend the Alamo to 
the uttermost. Like Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, they pledged 
themselves to victory or death. Then and there did they consecrate Texas to 
liberty. The Alamo was stormed by thousands of ferocious Spaniards and 
Mexicans. The Texans fought like demons, killing hundreds of their assailants, 
but were finally overpowered, and were all put to death. Two women, their two 
children, and a negro boy, were the only survivors of this dreadful massacre ; 
and but one, a Mexican woman, is alive to-day. The " Napoleon of the West" 
gave his name to infamy, and sealed the doom of his own cause by this infamous 
massacre and the still bloodier one which followed it at Goliad. The heroism of 
the Alamo was the inspiration of the men who fell upon Santa Anna's army 
at San Jacinto, destroyed it, and made Texas free. Not even the bones of 
Travis and his men were preserved. The mutilated bodies were burned a few 
hours after they fell; and the fierce north winds. which now and then sweep over 
San Antonio, have long ago scattered the ashes which the Texans a year after 
the massacre had gathered up and reverently buried. 



XVI. 



THE PLAINS THE CATTLE TRADE. 

THERE are many almost distinctively Mexican types to be seen in the 
San Antonio streets. Prominent among them are the horsemen from 
the plains, with their blankets well girt about them, and their swarthy features 
shaded by broadest of sombreros. Youths mounted on overloaded little mules 
shout lustily in Spanish. The drivers of the ox-teams swear and swear again as 
they crack their long whips, and groups of rough, semi- Indian looking men sun 
themselves at unprotected corners. The candy and fruit merchants lazily wave 
their fly-brushes, and sit staring open-eyed all day, although the intense sun- 
light reflected from the hard, white roads is painfully annoying to the stranger. 
The old beggars, half-blind and wholly ragged, huddle together, howling for 
alms, and invoking ten thousand saints, or, muttering to themselves, stray aim- 
lessly up and down the avenues. 

A residence of a few weeks in San Antonio affords one a good look into the 
cattle trade of Western Texas, one of the most remarkable industries of the south- 
west. One might with justice call it an indolent industry — for it accomplishes 




"The horsemen from the plains." 



1 68 



THE CATTLE TRADE OF WESTERN TEXAS. 




1 The candy and fruit merchants lazily wave their fly-brushes 
[Page 167.] 



great results in a lazy, disorderly way, and makes men millionaires before 

they have had time to arouse themselves for real work. 

Cattle- trading is a grand pastime with hundreds of Texans. They like the 

grandiloquent sound of a "purchase of 60,000 head." There is something at 

once princely and patriarchal about 
it. They enjoy the adventurous life 
on the great grazing plains, the 
freedom of the ranch, the possi- 
bility of an Indian incursion, the 
swift coursing on horseback over 
the great stretches, the romance of 
the road. Nearly all the immense 
region from the Colorado to the 
Rio Grande is given up to stock- 
raising. The mesquite grass car- 
pets the plains from end to end, 
and the horses, cattle and sheep 

luxuriate in it; while the giant pecan throws down stores of oily nuts every 

year for the wandering hogs to revel over. 

The mountainous regions around San Antonio offer superb facilities for sheep 

husbandry; and the valleys along the streams are fertile enough for the most 

exacting farmer. There are millions of cattle now 

scattered over the plains between San Antonio and 

the Rio Grande, and the number is steadily increas- 
ing. It is not uncommon for a single individual to 

own 200,000 head. 

The cattle owners of Western Texas have been 

much before the public for the last few years, on account 

of their numerous complaints of thievery on the frontier. 

While I was in San Antonio a Government commission 

arrived from a long and tedious journey through the 

Rio Grande valley and the country between San Antonio 

and the Mexican boundary, where they had been taking 

testimony with regard to the Mexican outrages. 

Opinion seems somewhat divided as to the extent 

and nature of the damage done the cattle- raising inter- 
est by the Mexicans, some Texans even asserting that 

the Texan claims are grossly exaggerated, and that there 

has been much stealing on both sides of the Rio Grande. 

But the commission itself has taken testimony with great f 

care, and, whatever may be the exact nature of the ',: 

claims against Mexico, they are enough to justify a " 

prompt aggressive policy in case the hybrid neighbor 

republic does not see fit to take notice of the demands of her more powerful 

sister. The troubles on the Mexican-Texan frontier have resulted largely from 




A Mexican Beggar. 



THE KICKAPOOS AND THEIR RAIDS. I69 

an attack made on the Kickapoo Indians. It appears that these Indians, during 
our late civil war, left their reservation with the intention of going to Mexico, and 
while passing through Texas in May of 1864, were mistaken for a hostile force by 
a Confederate corps of observation, and were attacked. When the mistake was 
corrected, the Indians were allowed to proceed on their way ; but they found the 
attack a pretext for an offensive policy, and soon after reaching Mexico began a 
series of distressing frontier depredations. There were only nine hundred and 
thirty-five of these Kickapoo Indians, originally ; and it is now supposed that at 
least half of them are dead ; but those who remain are terrible fellows. The 
Kickapoo is a kind of perverted Indian; he is unlike the original tribes of Texas, 
who, like their neighbors in Mexico, were mild-mannered until aroused by ideas 
of wrong. He was born with the genius of murder and rapine firmly implanted 
in his breast, and being somewhat civilized, of course he is much worse than if he 
were a pure savage. He had not been long in Mexico before he began to 
dominate the native Mexican Indians ; and the Comanches joining with them, 
they soon had things their own way in their new home. 

These Bedouins of the West have been a terror to the stock-farmer since 
1 864. They have acted like fiends ; seeming to be far more malignant and 
savage than their ancestors. Indeed, as the Indian race decreases in Texas, from 
disease, internal dissensions, and intangible causes, the "type of the decadence" 
is the most repulsive which the blood has ever produced. It is as if the savage 
spirit made its last protest against annihilation tenfold more bitter and deadly 
than its first. 

The Kickapoos, in conjunction with Comanches, Apaches, and Mexicans, 
have carried off immense herds, and committed numberless murders. They 
have been almost ubiquitous, overrunning that vast section between the Rio 
Grande and San Antonio rivers, and the road between the towns of San Antonio 
and Eagle Pass, — a region embracing 30,000 square miles. They were wont to 
dash into the ranches and stampede all the stock they could frighten, driving it 
before them to the Rio Grande, and, although well-armed pursuers might be 
close behind them as they crossed the fords, they would usually escape with their 
prey, knowing that in Mexico reclamation would be an impossibility. 

They came, and still come from time to time, within a few miles of San 
Antonio, to gather up horses ; and if they cannot succeed in escaping with the 
horses they invariably kill them. At the full of the moon the Indians will 
usually enter the vicinity of the ranches, on foot, carrying their lassos. They 
hide carefully until they have discovered where the stock is, and then the gather- 
ing up is a speedy matter. An attempt at pursuit is folly, as the pursuer can 
only travel in the day-time, when he can see the trail, and the only hope of 
peace seems to be the extermination of the Indians.* The citizens gather at San 
Antonio, and discuss measures of vengeance ; but it is useless. 

The Rio Grande valley has always been the paradise of stock-farming. 
Before the Spaniards had left the Texan country, the whole section between the 

* I believe the Kickapoos in question have been removed from Mexico to some reservation, 
but there are still Indians enough left in Texas to keep stock-stealing up to its old standard. 



170 



MEXICAN THIEVERY CATTLE 



'TRAILS. 



Rio Grande and the Nueces was covered with stock. The Indians were in those 
days employed in herding cattle ; imagine one of them engaged in such a gentle, 
pastoral occupation to-day ! As soon as the influence of the missionaries began 
to wane, the Indians ceased herding, and returned to their old habits of murder 
and rapine. 

The United States Commissioners to Texas are of opinion that not only have 
the Indians been aided and abetted by Mexicans in their stealing from the ran- 
cheros of Western Texas, but that Mexicans themselves are directly engaged in 
the stealing. So great has been the loss from these causes since the war, that 
the number of cattle now grazing west of San Antonio is between two-thirds and 
three-fourths less than in 1866. 

But the stock-raisers, despite the many dangers and vexations which beset 
them, are a healthy, happy set. Their manners have a tinge of Spanish gravity 
and courtesy ; they are sun-browned, stalwart men, unused to the atmosphere of 
cities, and in love with the freedom of the plains. 




"The citizens gather at San Antonio, and discuss measures of vengeance " [Page 169.] 

Their herds of thousands range at will over the unfenced lands, and only once 
yearly do the stout rancheros drive them up to be examined, branded, and 
separated. Ownership is determined by peculiar brands and ear- marks, records 
of which are kept in the offices of the county clerks, and published in the news- 
papers. There is a stock-raisers' association which has decided on rules for 
mutual protection and aid. 

In 1872 there were 450,000 cattle driven overland from Western Texas to 
Kansas, through the Indian Territory, by Bluff Creek and Caldwell, up the 
famous " Chisholm trail." In 1871 as many as 700,000 were driven across. 
The general value of "Kansas beeves" is $12 to $13 gold; but after deducting 
all expenses, the average profit on the "drive" is not much more than a fair rate 
of interest on the money invested. The cattle interest is rather heavily taxed 
for transportation, and suffers in consequence. 



WILD TEXAN CATTLE MAVERICK S BULLS. 



171 



But few cattle are transported by sea, the outlet for the trade by way of 
Indianola having never been very successful. The Morgan steamships carry 
perhaps 40,000 beeves yearly that way. The two great shipping points in 
1872-73 were Wichita, on a branch of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail- 
road, at the junction of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, and Ellsworth, 
on the Kansas Pacific railroad. The whole country, at the time of transit, is 
covered with vast herds, which begin to arrive in Kansas early in May and await 
buyers there. A stampede is something which baffles description ; you must 
witness it. It is a tempest of horns and tails, a thunder of hoofs, a lightning of 
wild eyes ; I can describe it no better. 

Merely to see a man on foot is sometimes sufficient to set Texan cattle into a 
frenzy of fear, and a speedy stampede ; for the great majority of them have 
never been approached save by men on horseback. The gathering up of stock is 
no light task, as a herd of 75,000 cattle will range over an area fifty miles 



wide by 1 00 miles long. 
Large stock- raisers are 
always increasing their 
stock by buying herds 
adjacent to their ranges. 
Many persons make for- 
tunes by simply gathering 
up and branding the 
cattle which the rightful 
owners have neglected 
to brand ; cattle found 
unbranded, and a year 
old, being known as 
" Mavericks." 

The origin of this 
name is very funny. 
Colonel Maverick, an old 
and wealthy citizen of 
San Antonio, once placed 
a small herd of cattle on 
an island in Matagorda 




many other things to 
think of, soon forgot all 
about them. After a 
lapse of several years, 
some fishermen sent the 
Colonel word that his 
cattle had increased 
alarmingly, and that 
there was not grass 
enough on the island to 
maintain them. So he 
sent men to bring them 
off. There is probably 
nothing more sublimely 
awful in the whole his- 
tory of cattle-raising than 
the story of those beasts, 
from the time they were 
driven from the island 
until they had scattered 
to the four corners of 
Western Texas. Among 



Bay, and having too A Texan Cattk-Drover. 

these Matagordian cattle which had run wild for years were 800 noble, but ferocious 
bulls ; and wherever they went they found a clear field. It was as if a menagerie 
of lions had broken loose in a village. Mr. Maverick never succeeded in keeping 
any of the herd together ; they all ran madly whenever a man came in sight ; and 
for many a day thereafter, whenever unbranded and unusually wild cattle were 
seen about the ranges, they were called " Mavericks." The bulls were long 
the terror of the land. 

The estimated profits of cattle- raising are enormous. Some authenticated 
instances are worthy especial mention. One man in the vicinity of San Antonio 



172 



PROFITS OF CATTLE-RAISING TROOPS IN TEXAS. 



began in 1856 with 150 head of cattle; he now has 60,000, and is considered 
worth $350,000. Another, who began by taking stock to attend to for one- 
third of the increase, is worth about the same sum. One ranch, that of Mr. 
Kennedy, some distance west of Corpus Christi, has an inclosure of 150,000 
acres, the fencing for which alone cost $100,000. Many a stock- raiser brands 
15,000 head of calves yearly. The profits of horse-raising, making due allow- 
ance for losses by Indian raids and American and Mexican horse-thieves, are 
even greater. The owner of a large horse- ranch near Castroville* told me that 
he had repeatedly endeavored to get up an issue with the Indians, who often 
attacked his ranch — hoping to get them indicted and then requisitioned in 
Mexico ; but their tribal arrangements prevent that. The chief alone is respon- 
sible for the bad deeds of all his warriors, and any quantity of indictments 
would never bring him to justice. An attempt to operate under the treaty made 
by Corwin, in 1862 — by which the Government authorized district judges to 
demand the extradition of criminals, — was equally unsuccessful.. The Mexican 
officers on the frontier recognize no law, no authority except their own. 

The head-quarters of such troops of the regular army as are in the Depart- 
ment of Texas, is at San Antonio. A chain of defensive forts extends from Fort 
Sill in the Indian Territory — in that section occupied by the Kiowas, Arapahoes 
and Comanches, — south-west and south to the Rio Grande, and along the 
Mexican frontier. Forts Richardson, Griffin, Concho, McKavett, Clark, Duncan, 
Mcintosh, Ringgold, and Brown, are the most important posts, and each is well 
garrisoned with several companies of infantry and cavalry. It is at Fort Clark 
that the gallant Colonel McKenzie has long been stationed. The close proximity 

of the fort to the 
river has some- 
what troubled 
the raiding Indi- 
ans; but they 
generally man- 
age to pass be- 
tween the forts 
without being 
observed. Cav- 
alry scouts are 
constantly enga- 
ged along the 

Military Head-quarters — San Antonio. whole defensive 

line ; but the men and horses are but poor matches for the Indians and their 
ponies. There is no telegraphic communication from fort to fort ; therefore the 
officers at the various posts are never capable of concerted action. The line of 
forts extending from Concho to Fort Sill is intended to protect against incursions 
from the " Staked Plains " district, where the Indians still wander at their own 

* Castroville is one of the most thriving towns in Western Texas. It was founded by Henry 
Castro, a Frenchman of great culture and executive ability. 




TABLE-LANDS INDIAN TACT. 



173 



sweet will over the grass-carpeted plains, which are seemingly boundless as the 
ocean. The grandeur, the rugged beauty of these mighty table-lands will for 
many years yet be enjoyed only by the Indian ; he makes a good fight there. 
South-west from Fort Concho runs a defensive line, dotted with Forts Stock- 
ton, Davis, Hultman, and Bliss, the latter opposite El Paso, at the extreme 
western limit of Texas, and nearly seven hundred miles from San Antonio, at the 
entrance of the mountain passes of Chihuahua. Service in this department is no 
child's play; it is a rough and tumultuous school; and to see the general activity, 
one wonders that more is not actually accomplished. 




Negro Soldiers of the San Antonio Garrison. 

Railroads alone can solve the question. As it is, the thirty-five hundred men 
in the department, whether officered by General Auger, the present department 
commander, or General Grant, cannot catch and punish the evil-minded Indians. 
The soldiers are rarely attacked; the alert and logical savage seeks a peaceful 
prey rather than a fight with men as well armed as himself. Never advertising 
his coming, as the soldiers too often do, he rarely meets them. He is all eyes 
and ears ; the tiniest cloud of dust on the horizon announces to him the approach 
of some one; he notes the faintest tremor among the grasses, and knows what 
it signifies; he detects a little imprint on the turf, and can decide at once whether 
or not it is that of a soldier's foot, or a white man's horse. 

When he mounts a hill, he looks about to see if there is anything stirring on 
the plain ; and if there be, he hides until he knows what it is. It is easy to see 
that recruits and unpracticed frontiersmen cannot fight such people as these. 
Very few soldiers are harmed ; it is mainly the innocent settlers, who have no 



174 LIMITLESS PRAIRIE DECAYING INDIAN TRIBES. 

idea of protecting themselves, who suffer. Since 1866 over 300 unoffending 
Texans have been killed by murderous Indians and Mexicans. 

Great care is necessary in traversing the plains, even with an escort of soldiers. 
A gentleman, returning from Fort Clark, once strayed ahead of the main party 
and was found, with arrows sticking in him and minus his scalp, dead. The 
Indians even hovered around the Government commissioners, on their journey 
from Eagle Pass to Laredo. For efficiency's sake, the Texans should be allowed 
in some way to take the matter of subduing the Indians and protecting their fron- 
tier against the Mexicans into their own hands. 

Wonderful land of limitless prairie, of beautiful rivers and strange foliage — 
land where there is room to breathe full breaths — land beyond which there 
seem no boundary lines — the railroad will yet subdue you ! Then there will be 
no more mystery in your plains — your chaparral thickets — your groves of post 
oak and pecan — your cypress-bordered streams — your grand ranges — your sun- 
burnished stretches. Stage routes will be forgotten ; the now rapidly decaying 
native Indian tribes will stray into some unexplored nook, never to sally forth 
again. The Rio Grande will no longer be a boundary, and the Sierra Madre's 
rocky gaps will echo back the sharp accents of the American tongue. All this 
in a few years, unless the tokens fail ! 



XVII. 



DENISON — TEXAN CHARACTERISTICS. 



TANDING in the main street of Denison, Texas, the new town near the 
1 southern border of the Indian Territory, six hundred and twenty-one miles 

south-west of St. 
Louis, it was hard 
to realize that only 
four months before 
my visit its site 
was almost a wil- 
derness, not a 
building of any 
kind having yet 
been erected there. 
For all around us 
was Babel — a wild 
rush of business, 
a glory in affairs, 
an unbounded de- 
light in mere la- 
bor, by which I 
was at once op- 
pressed and ap- 
palled. 

The slightest 
indication of prog- 
ress was pointed 
out as a gigantic 
foreshadowing of 
the future preem- 
inence of Deni- 
son. "There are 
from 2,500 to 
3,000 people here 
now," said one 
gentleman to us: 
"how's that for 
four months? 
That'll make some 
of the incredulous 




Scene in a Gambling House — "Playing Keno" — Denison. Texa<= 



12 



176 



THE BIRTH OF DENISON. 



folks take their frame houses off from the rollers !" — an expression intended to 
open up a startling prospect for the future of Denison. But, indeed, all these 
enthusiastic pioneers of a new civilization were justified in their seemingly wild 
prophecies of greatness. Northern Texas, under the beneficent influences of 
railroad pioneering, is assuming a prominence which had never been imagined 
for it until within the last five years. 

As soon as the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railway had crossed the Red 
river, a stream of immigration, which the most sanguine had not hoped for, set 
in. The North-west seemed to move en masse. The tracts of fertile, black- 
wax land, which literally needed but to be tickled with the plough to smile a 






i 







' ■>• "llllllifW 

'..■'.;. ill,; ■..,.■.:.■ 




mmmmmw///;/- ■?.,/)////■: /■Mm/ nt-JiiimMmiltUa 

"Men drunk and sobtr danced to rude music' 



[Page 177.] 

harvest, were rapidly taken up, and Denison sprang into existence as the chief 
town of the newly developed region. It was organized four months before my 
visit, and since that time the Denison Town Company had sold $90,000 worth of 
building lots. The town stands in a county absolutely free from debt, and is 
at the outlet of one of the most fertile farming regions of the world. Two 
railroads, coming to it from opposite points, and not costing it a cent, laid the 
foundation for its remarkable advance, an advance more like magic than like the 
normal growth of a pioneer settlement. 

All the lumber for the houses and business establishments was brought 
hundreds of miles, there being none suitable in the vicinity; and the car-loads 



ROUGH LIFE- — RAPID IMPROVEMENT. IJJ 

of material were changed into rough but commodious structures in a twinkling. 
It was exceedingly remarkable, also, that in a community one-half of which was 
undoubtedly made up of professional ruffians, "terminus" gamblers, and the 
offscourings of society, and where there was not yet a regularly organized gov- 
ernment, there was not more of terrorism. 

Every third building in the place was a drinking saloon with gambling appur- 
tenances, filled after nightfall with a depraved, adventurous crowd, whose 
profanity was appalling, whose aspect was hideous. Men drunk and sober 
danced to rude music in the poorly- lighted saloons, and did not lack female 
partners. In vulgar bestiality of language, in the pure delight of parading 
profanity and indecency, the ruffian there had no equal. The gambling houses 
were nightly frequented by hundreds. Robberies were, of course, of frequent 
occurrence in the gambling hells, and perhaps are so still; but in the primitive 
hotels, where the luckless passengers from the Missouri, Kansas and Texas 
railway awaited a transfer by stage to Sherman, and where they were packed 
three or four together in beds in a thinly-boarded room through whose cracks 
rain might fall and dust blow, they were as safe from robbery or outrage as 
in any first-class house. Rough men abounded, and would, without doubt, 
have knocked any one upon the head who should find himself alone, unarmed, 
and late at night, in their clutches. But the carrying of concealed weapons is so 
expressly forbidden by the laws of Texas, that cases of shooting rarely occurred, 
and there was no more danger to the life or 'limb of the traveler than may be 
met with on Broadway. I was too late to see the Denison where rascals had 
held supreme sway. Their regime vanished when the railroad crossed the 
Red river. 

The business men of Denison are a stern, self-reliant, confident company. 
They have a thorough belief in Northern Texas; intend to tame its wildness, and 
make it one of the gardens of the world. The Kansas and Missouri and Illinois 
and Western New York character crops out everywhere in Denison, and is the 
chief reliance of the town. 

The aboriginal Texan looks on, and admires the energy displayed, but he 
takes good care not to mix in the fray too much himself. There is something 
sublimely impudent, charmingly provoking, in the manner in which he disappears 
from work and the street when a cold "Norther" comes on; in the cool, defiant 
way in which he forces others to work for him, and the utter surprise he mani- 
fests when he is accused of droning. He is a child of the sun ; he dislikes effort ; 
it gives him no gratification to labor in the rough ways of a new town like 
Denison. 

Yet this same man can leap to the level of a hero when his rights are 
assailed; can bathe a San Jacinto plain with his best blood; can stand at an 
Alamo's breastworks until covered with wounds, and can ride at the head of a 
brigade into the very gates of death without losing one iota of his magnificent 
equipoise. 

But the old population of Northern Texas is rapidly assimilating with the 
new-comers, and there is no longer any vestige of the intolerance which made a 



1 7 8 



THE NEW TOWN S AMBITION- 



RED HALL. 



Texan regard a stranger as an intruder. Neither is it safe in a new town like 
Denison to judge a man, as we are forced to do in large cities, by his outer garb 
and manners. The huge hulking fellow with one cheek distended with tobacco, 
and with his clothes all so disposed that they seem to have been thrown upon 
him, will answer you with all the courtesy and grace of a high-bred gentleman, 
and will show a consideration for your opinions and your remarks which you do 
not always receive from the habitues of a city. The roughness is exterior only, 
and he who contents himself with a passing glance will not penetrate to the 
sterling qualities which that exterior conceals. 

The earnestness of the new town, the almost religious quality of its ambition, 
were amusing as well as inspiring. Everyone talked in exaggerated phrase; land 
values were fictitious ; the estimates of immigration were overdrawn ; the " prob- 
abilities" were certainly elastic, but there was such hope ! Many men who had 
only been in Texas a year or two had already become rich, enhancing, at the 
same time, the value of property in the localities in which they had settled. In 
the little boarded newspaper office there was the same dauntless ambition ; in the 
saloon, again the same. " Sherman ain't nothin' to this yer," said one man to 
me ; " we 've got the riffle on her on saloons." He could not even allow a neigh- 
bor town a preeminence in vice. " General Sheridan 's going to build a supply 
depot here, 'n' then you '11 see !" was the final, annihilating rejoinder administered 
to a carping Shermanite in our hearing. All the inhabitants were determined to 
make a magnificent city out of this irregular group of one-story wooden build- 
ings, confusedly located on the high rolling larid four miles south of the Red river, 
and their zeal was both to them and to us " like new wine." 

He would, indeed, be a brave man who should, at this writing, prophesy that 
the great new route to the Gulf will redeem the Indian Territory from its present 
isolation, and bring it into the Union first as on probation, and finally as a State. 
Nevertheless, the people of the south-west are firmly convinced that such will be 

the case, and, for various important rea- 
sons, the inhabitants of Northern Texas 
earnestly desire it. The existence of 
such an immense frontier, so near to the 
newly settled districts of Texas, enables 
rogues of all grades to commit many 
crimes with impunity, for, once over the 
border, a murderer or a horse -thief can 
hide in the hills or in some secluded val- 
ley until his pursuers are fatigued, and 
can then make his way out in another 
direction. 

So frequent had this method of es- 
cape become, at the time of the founding 
of Denison, that the law-abiding citizens 
were enraged ; and the famous deputy - 
Red Haii." sheriff, "Red Hall," a young man of 




A GOOD CONSTABLE SHERMAN. 1 79 

great courage and unflinching " nerve," determined to attempt the capture of 
some of the desperadoes. Arming himself with a Winchester rifle, and with his 
belt garnished with navy revolvers, he kept watch on certain professional crim- 
inals. One day, soon after a horse-thief had been heard from in a brilliant 
dash of grand larceny, he repaired to the banks of the Red river, confident that 
the thief would attempt to flee. 

In due time, the fugitive and two of his friends appeared at the river, all 
armed to the teeth, and while awaiting the ferry-boat, were visited by Hall, who 
drew a bead upon them, and ordered them to throw down their arms. They 
refused, and a deadly encounter was imminent; but he finally awed them into sub- 
mission, threatening to have the thief's comrades arrested for carrying concealed 
weapons. They delivered up their revolvers and even their rifles, and fled, and 
the horse-thief, rather than risk a passage- at- arms with the redoubtable Hall, 
returned with him to Denison, after giving the valiant young constable some 
ugly wounds on the head with his fist. The passage of the river having thus 
been successfully disputed by the law, the rogues became somewhat more wary. 

"Red Hall" seemed to bear a charmed life. He moved about tranquilly 
every day in a community where there were doubtless an hundred men who 
would have delighted to shed his blood ; was often called to interfere in broils 
at all hours of the night ; yet his life went on. He had been ambushed and 
shot at, and threatened times innumerable, yet had always exhibited a scorn 
for his enemies, which finally ended in forcing them to admire him. When 
he visited me on my arrival in Denison, he remarked, " I shall see you in Sher- 
man Monday, as I have some prisoners to take to court there ;" but Monday 
morning, as I was starting for Sherman, he informed me that when he awoke in 
the morning, he was surrounded by armed men ; a pistol was held under his 
nose ; and he was told that he was arrested at the instance of the United States 
Marshal, to whom some one had been retailing slanders concerning him. Even 
as he spoke he was vigilantly guarded by armed men. But in the afternoon he 
was free again — once more in authority, and awing the ruffians into a proper 
respect. 

The tracks of the great railway connecting Northern Texas with the outer 
world had but just been completed to Denison when I visited the town, but the 
huge freight-houses were already filled with merchandise awaiting transportation 
to the interior. The Overland Transportation Company was closing its books, for 
the Texas Central railway line was expected in a few weeks to reach the Red 
river, and the great Gulf route would be complete. 

Staging to Sherman, we passed immense wagon-trains of merchandise, creak- 
ing forward through the wax-like soil, which clung in such masses to the wheels 
that the teams stopped from time to time, discouraged. Gangs of stout fellows 
from Illinois and Missouri were marching along the highways, en route for the 
railroad lines which they were to aid in constructing; mule-teams, drawing loads 
of lumber, each team driven by a six-foot Texan with a patriarchal beard, passed 
us ; wild-looking men mounted on horses or mules, with rifles slung over shoul- 
ders, and saddle-bags stuffed with game, cantered by. 



i8o 



DISCOURAGED IMMIGRANTS THE SQUARE IN SHERMAN. 



Sometimes we met a discouraged company, painfully forcing its way back 
toward sunrise, the paterfamilias driving a span of sorry mules which dragged 
a weary wagon-load of grumbling and disheartened family. So, faring forward 
through forest and brake, over creeks and under hills, beside smiling fields and 
along mournful wastes, into primitive clearings and out of forsaken nooks, and 
crannies where civilization had only made the wilderness look worse, we reached 
Sherman, the forty-year-old shire town of Grayson county. 




The Public Square in Sherman, Texas. 

Glorious sunlight enlivened the town as we entered it, and intensest activity- 
prevailed, the county court being in session. The town is built around a square, 
in the centre of which stands a low, unpainted wooden building, known as the 
Court-House. The "grand jury" was not far from the aforesaid building, as we 
drew up at the hotel opposite it, and was to outward appearance a collection of 
rough, sensible farmers, impressed with a full sense of their duty. The horses on 
which half-a-hundred of the neighboring farmers had ridden in to attend to their 
marketing and upon the sessions of the court, were hitched at a common hitch- 
ing frame not far from the court-house ; and in the centre of the square a noisy 
auctioneer, whom the Texans were regarding with admiring eyes, was bawling 
out his wares. The plank sidewalks were crammed with tall youths, in patched 
homespun; with negroes, whose clothing was a splendid epitome of color ; with 



MIDWINTER IN TEXAS DENISON AS A 'YEARLING. l8l 

spruce speculators — Northerners and Westerners — dressed in the latest styles; 
with dubious-looking characters, who shrank a little apart from the common gaze, 
as if afraid of the day-light; with swine, that trotted hither and yon; and with 
the hook-nosed and loud-voiced Israelites, who are found in every city and 
hamlet throughout the South. 

Large numbers of people seemed diligently engaged in doing nothing what- 
ever, or in frankly enjoying the delicious sunlight, which gave new glory and 
picturesqueness to everything upon which it rested. Now and then a soft breeze 
came gently from the up- negro crawled to . the side- 

lands, and softened the effect ^^^^TnT^v^ walk's edge, and with his 

of this generous sun. The ^S^j^fifcH. ^" eet * n ^ e mu d, blinked like 

excited gambler came out ~^^^^^^^^^V- an owl in the fierce glare; the 



to bathe his livid face in -with swine that trotted hither stage-drivers swore round 
zephyr and sunlight ; the and yon -" but rather jocund oaths at 

the rearing and plunging mules drawing the coaches for Denison, McKinney, 
and other little towns ; and the big negro who guarded the court-house door 
twirled the great key majestically, and looked ferocious. 

Although it was midwinter, the day was as perfect as one in June at the 
North ; but the languor which stole over us was purely Southern, as I imagined 
myself to be dreaming away the afternoon in lazy abandon and irresolute com- 
fort, spiced only with the charm of studying new types of a common nationality. 
Toward evening there was absolute tranquillity all over the place. Not even 
a loud word was spoken. The dusky figures who sat crouched in the porch of 
our hotel, mutely regarding the glories of the setting sun, seemed almost in the 
act of worship. 

Denison was a yearling when I saw it for the second time, and the most won- 
derful changes had meanwhile taken place. The Texas Central railway line was 
completed. Northern and Southern Texas were connected, and Pullman cars 
were running through the untamed prairies. The gamblers and ruffians had lied. 
Denison had acquired a city charter ; had a government, and the rabble had 
departed before law could reach them. A smart new hotel, near the railroad, was 
doing a driving business, hundreds of people thronging its dining-rooms. 

Above Denison, at the river, another town had sprung up, a child 'of the 
Texas Central, and ambitiously named " Red River City." Newsboys called the 
daily paper about the streets of Denison; we heard of the opera-house; we saw 
the announcement of church services ; and the notices of meetings for the dis- 
cussion and advocacy of new railroad routes were numerous. 

I confess to a certain feeling of disappointment in not having found more 
marked peculiarities of the people of Texas. There are, of course, phases and 
bits of dialect which distinguish them from the inhabitants of other sections ; but 
even the rude farmer in the back-country is not as singular as he has been repre- 
sented. In extreme Southern and extreme Northern Texas, the visitor from the 
North or West sees but little variation from his own types in the cities ; and yet 
in the remote districts he may find more ignorance and less idea of comfort than 
he would have thought possible in America.- 



182 



THE OLD STYLE TEXAN FARMER BAD COOKERY. 



There are a good many instances of rude and incult rich men; people who 
are of the old regime, and who, while owning thousands of cattle, sheep, and 
horses, live in log-houses, eat mean food, and have scarcely more than one suit of 
clothes in ten years. But these people are quietly disappearing before the new- 
comers. At first they are fierce against innovation, and indignant at frame 
houses, railroad stations, and saloons ; but finding that they must yield or retire, 
they acquiesce. 

The general characteristics of an old style Texan farm were unthrift and 
untidiness ; the land was never half tilled, because it produced enough to support 
life without being highly cultivated. When a fence fell into decay, — if by some 
strange chance there was a fence, — the rails or boards lay where they fell; people 




Bridge over the Red River — (Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway). 

grew up like weeds, and choked each other's growth. Those who held slaves 
counted their wealth in " niggers," and sometimes boasted that they were worth 
a hundred thousand dollars, while living in meaner and more uncomfortable 
fashion than the poorest Irishman at the North. 

The only amusement of the paterfamilias was a hunt, or a ride to the county 
seat in court time, where, in days when every one carried arms, there was usually 
some exciting event to disturb the monotony of existence — perhaps to disturb 
existence itself. There was no market, no railroad within hundreds of miles, no 
newspaper, no school, save perhaps some private institution miles from the farm 
or plantation, and no intellectual life or culture whatever. 

The rich slave-owner was a kind of patriarchal savage, proud of his own dirt 
and ignorance. The heroic epoch of the struggle for independence being over, 
thousands of persons settled down to such life as this, and thought it vastly fine. 
What a magnificent awakening has come to them ! 

The mass of people in the interior still have a hearty scorn for anything 
good to eat. The bitter coffee, and the greasy pork, or "bacon," as it is always 
called, still adorns the tables of most farmers. A railroad president, inspecting a 
route in Northern Texas, stopped at a little house for dinner. The old lady of the 
homestead wishing to treat her guest with becoming dignity, inquired in the 
kindest manner, after having spread the usual food before him, "Won't ye have 



PHRASES PLAYFUL PROFANITY. I83 

a little bacon fat to wallop your corn dodgers in now, won't ye ? " This was the 
acme of hospitality in that region. 

Now and then, in these days of immigration, a housewife will venture a timid 
" Reckon ye don't think much of our home-made fare, do ye? " when the visitor 
is a stranger ; and, indeed, he shows upon his face his wonder that a well-to-do 
farmer's stout sons and pretty daughters are satisfied with pork and molasses and 
clammy biscuits, with no vegetables whatever. 

. The negro is responsible for the introduction of such oceans of grease into 
Texan cookery ; it suited his taste, and the white people for whom he cooked 
mutely accepted it, just as they insensibly accepted certain peculiarities of his 
dialect, — notably "dat 'ar" and "disyer," and "furder" for further; mispronun- 
ciation which it makes one stare to hear good-looking white people use, as if they 
supposed it correct. The Texan has one phrase by which he may easily be 
recognized abroad : " I reckon so" with the accent on the last word, is his com- 
mon phrase of assent. In the country, when riding on horseback, and inquiring 
how far it is to a certain place, you will now arid then be told that it is "two 
sights and a look," which you must understand if you can. 

There is in Western Texas a more highly-colored, vivid, and dramatic manner 
of talk than in the rest of the State, doubtless the result of long contact with 
the Spaniard and Mexican. In parts of Northern Texas, too, among some 
classes, there is a profanity which exceeds anything I have ever encountered 
elsewhere. In Western Texas it is fantastic, and, so to speak, playful. I once 
traveled from Galveston to Houston in the same car with a horse-drover, who will 
serve as an example. This man was a splendid specimen of the Texan of the 
plains, robust and perfectly formed. There was a certain chivalrous grace and 
freedom about all his movements which wonderfully impressed one. His clean- 
cut face was framed in a dark, shapely beard and moustache, which seemed as if 
blown backward by the wind. He wore a broad ' hat with a silver cord around 
it, and I felt impelled to look for his sword, his doublet, and his spurs, and to 
fancy that he had just stepped out of some Mexican romance. 

His conversation was upon horses, his clear -voice ringing high above the 
noise of the car-wheels, as he laughingly recounted anecdotes of adventures 
on ranches in the West, nearly every third word being an oath. He caress- 
ingly cursed ; he playfully damned ; he cheerfully invoked all the evil spirits 
that be ; he profaned the sacred name, dwelling on the syllables as if it were a 
pet transgression, and as if he feared that it would be too brief. 

Even in bidding his friend good-by, he cursed as heartily as an English 
boatswain in a storm, but always with the same cheeriness, and wound up by 
walking off lightly, laughing and murmuring blasphemous assent to his friend's 
last proposition. 

Some of the small towns in the interior are indeed trials to him who must 
long stay in them. My severest experience was in a Northern Texan "metrop 
olis," — its name shall be spared, — where the main hotel was a new board struc- 
ture, without the suspicion of ceiling or lathing on the premises, and through 
whose roof one could see the stars. The front office was about the size of a 



I84 EXPERIENCES IN A ; MUSHROOM METROPOLIS. 

New England wood-box; and when some twenty persons, variously impregnated 
with questionable liquids, had gathered therein, the effluvia became shocking. 

In the long, creaking supper-room beyond, a dirty cloth was laid on a dirtier 
table, and pork, fried to a cinder and swimming in grease hot enough to scorch 
the palate, was placed before the guests. To this was presently added, by the 
hands of a tall, angular, red-haired woman, a yellow mass of dough supposed to 
be biscuit, a cup of black, bitter bean-juice named coffee, and as a crowning 
torture, a mustard-pot, with very watery mustard in it. 

This, the regular sustenance, I suppose, of the unfortunate people of that 
town, was so unusually bad that I forthwith desired to be shown my room ; and 
was ushered into a creaking loft, over a whiskey saloon wherein a mob of 
drunken railroad laborers were quarreling, and threatening, with the most out- 
rageous profanity, to annihilate each other. To the music of these revels I 
attempted to lull my wearied body to repose ; but did not succeed, and went to 
the four-in-the-morning train unrefreshed. 

Even at the station my troubles were not at an end, for on venturing to 
expostulate with an employe for not checking my baggage, he profanely con- 
demned me, adding that " It's mighty easy to get up a fight in Texas." Had I 
remained twenty-four hours longer in that town, it is my firm belief that I 
should have been accommodated with a complete and thorough exposition of all 
the eccentric features generally accredited to the society of the State. 

The people of Texas suffered greatly from the war; thousands were ruined 
by it. Young and old together went to the fight, returning only to find ruin 
staring them in the face, and the poverty which was so bitter hangs by them still. 
The sudden fall from large fortune to day-labor, so general in Louisiana, smote 
Texas sternly. But never, on the whole, was a people more cheery. It is 
resolved to rebuild and to accept the advent of 

"New men, new faces, other minds." 

The beauty of the fair Southern land is but faintly shadowed in these pages. 
It is too intense to admit of transfer. But no visitor will ever forget the magic 
of the climate — never guilty of the extremes of heat or cold which we suffer 
in the North, and yet so varied that the most fastidious may suit themselves 
within home boundaries; one cannot forget the attractive wildness of the great 
western plains, nor the tropic luxuriance of the southern shore. 

He cannot forget his pilgrimage to rock-strewn Mount Bonnell, Austin's 
guardian mountain ; nor the Colorado running between its steep banks, with the 
wooded slopes beyond melting softly into the ethereal blue; nor the long, white 
roads, bordered by graceful live oaks ; nor the bayous, along which the whip- 
poor-wills and chuck- will's-widows keep up lively chorus all night long. 

Nor will one visitor forget how, just at dawn, he saw a troop of hundreds of 
Texan cattle fording a shallow stream, and leaving a track of molten silver behind 
them, as the sun smote the ripples made by their hurrying feet; nor how, by 
night, as the slowly-moving train stole across the country, millions of fire-flies 
flashed about the fields ; how gaunt and weary emigrants gathered in groups 



TEXAN SOUVENIRS. 185 

around the camp fires ; how, now and then, some weary figure, bent and ragged, 
stole up behind the train with pack upon its back, plodding its way toward the 
land of promise; how the darkies at the little stations where the iron horse 
stopped to refresh himself, sang quaint songs as they threw the wood into the 
tender; how mahogany-colored old women besieged him with platters, covered 
with antique " spring chicken " and problematic biscuits ; how hale, stalwart 
old men with patriarchal beards and extraordinary appetites for tobacco, talked 
with him of the rising glory of Texas, impressing upon him that this is a mighty 
State, sir ; fast rising to the lead, sir ; has come out of the war gloriously, sir ; 
and, sir, enough for all the world in her broad acres, sir ; yes, sir. 

Nor will he forget the motley throng of Mexican prisoners, straggling into 
the streets of Austin, charged with murder most foul, their great eyes glittering 
with demoniac hatred under the gray of their sombreros ; nor the pretty maidens 
dismounting from their restive ponies at the "horse-blocks" in front of the shops, 
and trailing their long overskirts before the merchants' windows ; nor the groups 
of negroes at the corners, chattering like parroquets. 

Nor the disguised army detective, slouching about the public places in the 
clothes of a western ranchero, prospecting for deserters ; nor the gaunt teamsters 
from the borders of the San Marcos, the Guadalupe, or the San Antonio, with 
their half-melancholy, half- ferocious look; nor the erect military figure of "the 
governor," with his keen, handsome face and blond Prussian moustache. 

Nor the typical land agent, with his bland smile and diffuse conversation 
about thousand-acre tracts and superb locations ; nor the dusty and pallid travel- 
ers descending from the El Paso stage, their Winchester rifles in their hands, 
and their nerves strained with eight hundred miles of adventurous stage travel. 

Nor can he forget how, one morning, on the banks of the beautiful Colorado, 
a ghastly cross-tree affronted the sky, while around a platform a great throng of 
white, and black, and brown men, American, and negro, and Mexican, gathered to 
see two men die. He will remember how the criminals came to the gallows and 
gazed round from the scaffold in search of some sympathetic desperado to help 
them; how, in his despair at finding none, one of them, in derision, broke into a 
shuffling dance, and after making a blackguard speech, fainted as the rope was 
placed about his guilty neck ; how the crowd jeered at and mocked the two men 
until the scene was over, leaving the vacant gallows to stand as a perpetual warning. 

Nor will he forget the moonlit evenings in the gardens of the southern coast, 
where the thick clumps of cedar joined their heavy perfume to that of the mag- 
nolia; where the rose and the myrtle vied in fragrance, and the dagger- tree 
spread its sharp leaves defiantly ; where the snow-white of the jessamine peered 
from the darkness; where the China- tree showered its strange fruit on the turf; 
the fig put forth its tender shoots; the orange and the oleander, the verbenas and 
the pansies all looked coquettishly out of their midwinter beds at the Northern 
new-comer, seeming to smile at his wonder; where the grape trellises were 
covered with clinging vines ; and where strange birds sang songs in consonance 
with the lapping of the waters on the Gulf shore, and with the intense hum of 
the unseen insect life, rising and falling like a magnificent harmony. 



XVIII. 



THE NEW ROUTE TO THE GULF. 



A JOURNEY from Sedalia, in Missouri, through the Indian Territory to Deni- 
son, will enable one to appreciate properly the vastness of the south- 
west, and the magnitude of the railway projects so constantly carried into 
execution there. 

The ruder aspects of Sedalia, the Missourian terminus of the Missouri, 
Kansas and Texas railway, have vanished before the march of improvement, and 
the town has arisen from the low level of a speculative frontier village, where the 
tenure of life and position in society was very uncertain, to the grade of an 

important junction, and a city of 
prominence. It is not very long 
since the revolver was the su- 
preme arbiter in all disputes in 
Sedalia, — since, indeed, the streets 
were cleared of all peaceable men 
in an instant, whenever there was 
prospect of a quarrel between the 
bloodthirsty thieves and ruffians 
who infested the whole adjacent 
region. 

The drift of iniquity from the 
impromptu towns along the Union 
Pacific line came into Missouri, 
Kansas, and the Indian Territory, 
as soon as the project of the new 
route to the Gulf was broached, 
and brought with it murder and 
wholesale robbery. The men who 
had been attracted to Missouri 
from the States of Illinois and 
Ohio, and from portions of Kansas, 
by the excellent chances to enrich 
themselves in land speculations, 
were appalled by the conduct 
of the drunken and ferocious 
fiends who came to haunt the new 
towns. The projectors of the 




THE MISSOURI, KANSAS AND TEXAS RAILWAY. 187 

new route to the Gulf had to face this criminal element and to submit to its 
presence in their midst. Often it was the stronger, and openly defied law, 
as is now the case in certain sections of the West. But the pioneers of the route 
had had their schooling in new lands ; the engineers and builders were men of 
muscle and brain, of coolness and " nerve," and moved quietly but irresistibly 
forward, amid the harassing outrages of a mean and cowardly banditti, whose 
chief precept was assassination, and whose trade was rapine. 

With dauntless energy, courage, and industry, and by the aid of generously 
expended capital, these pioneers of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railway 
worked steadfastly, and in three and a-half years laid 551 miles of solidly-con- 
structed track, or a little over half a mile for every working day. When they 
took up their task, the anguish of the war was hardly ended ; the total disorgan- 
ization of society consequent on the radical changes inaugurated in the lately 
slaveholding States made many of the conditions of life and labor onerous and 
disagreeable ; but the superb end hopfcd for always made the difficult means 
easier to work with. 

To-day a tract of country which, two years ago, was comparatively as 
unknown to the masses of our citizens as Central Africa, is now easily accessible; 
palace cars convey the traveler over the rich plains of the Indian territory from 
St. Louis, with its legacy of more than a century's history, to Denison, the 
young giant of Northern Texas, with its records of a year. 

Two New Yorkers, Messrs. George Denison and David Crawford, jr., gave 
the railway its first financial status, and brought it before the eyes of the world 
with its respectability thoroughly guaranteed, and its objects all properly 
explained. The enterprise, originally known as the Southern branch of the 
Union Pacific Railway Company, was magnificent in scope, and found ready 
support from men of large minds and ample means. 

The system north of the Red river, when perfected, was intended to compre- 
hend more than 1 ,000 miles ; and the proposed extension south of the Red river 
would amount to 1,000 more. The scheme was that of a grand vertebral line 
through Texas, via Waco and Austin, to Camargo on the west bank of the Rio 
Grande; thence almost due south, through Monterey, Saltillo, Zacatecas, San 
Luis Potosi, and Queretaro, to the City of Mexico. 

The company, in constructing its railway and branches through Missouri and 
Kansas, asked but few favors of the States. It has built the road mainly with its 
own money, and has shown the true pioneering spirit in boldly pushing its tracks, 
at an enormous expense, through the Indian Territory, without waiting for the 
settlement of the question of the distribution of lands there. The same indomit- 
able pluck and persistent effort will doubtless be shown in the future building of 
Texas and Mexican extensions. 

The Legislature of Texas has accorded the company organization under a 
special law, and the general law gives to any railway built within the State limits 
extensive land grants, so that the people will not be subjected to burdensome 
taxation, and in a few years the outside world will suddenly discover that a 
journey to Mexico is no more difficult than the present journey to New 



188 



JOURNEYING BY "SPECIAL TRAIN. 




Orleans, and that new lands and territories have been opened up to speculation 
and profit as if by magic. But the plan is not limited merely to this. It is 
possible that in future the line may extend from where it now joins the Houston 
and Texas Central railway at Denison, southward, down the valley of the Trinity, 

— the richest in Eastern Texas, — to Gal- 
veston, with a branch to the waters of 
Sabine Bay, which route to the Gulf, it 
is claimed, would save from 700 to 1,200 
miles of railway transportation upon all 
the foreign importations and exportations 
of the West Mississippi States and Terri- 
tories, over shipments via the Atlantic 
ports. The value of the Texas business 
will also be immense ; and should the Mis- 
souri, Kansas and Texas railway lines 
touch the Gulf, there will be travel and 
trade enough for it and . for the Interna- 
tional and Great Northern and the Houston 
"The Pet Conductor." anc j Xexas Central, even though they double 

their tracks and rolling stock. Besides this, the branch from Sedalia, extend- 
ing across the Missouri river at Booneville, to Moberly, Missouri,- gives a mag- 
nificent direct line from Chicago to Galveston. 

As the Indian Territory boasts no towns worthy the name along either of the 
two lines of rail which penetrate its domain, the railroad company placed at the 
disposition of our party a superb hotel car, equipped with kitchen, drawing, and 
sleeping-room. The. larder of the traveling-home was well stocked ; engineer, 
fireman, and brakeman took their rifles, prepared for an encounter with deer, or 
to chase the cautious wild turkey ; and a merry party, one frosty morning in 
January of 1873, rattled out of Sedalia. Both artist and writer were fascinated 
with this perfection of travel, this journeying so 
thoroughly at one's own will, with power to stop 
at every turn, and with no feeling of haste. The 
presiding genii of the train, "the Pet Conductor" 
and " Charlie," made the travel through the 
wilds as comfortable as the journey of an em- 
peror. Wherever it seemed to us good, we dis- 
missed our train to a side track, and wandered off. 
The Missouri towns in this section were passed 
over with a cursory glance, as being so much 
alike in general character. Windsor was a sleepy 
place ; Calhoun sleepier and older. The latter 
village was a cluster of ill-looking buildings, grouped around a muddy square. At 
the time we saw it, there was also snow enough to make it uncomfortable. "Yer 
ought to see it Sundays," said an informant at the depot, "when them fellows 
get full of tangle-foot. They kin just fight ! " But the railroad is bringing 




1 Charlie." 



SMALL TOWNS IN MISSOURI. 



189 



Calhoun a better future. A little farther on, we paused before the entrance to 
a shaft sunk in one of those rich veins of coal which crop out in all this section. 
An old man, dwarfed and bent, but still vigorous, the very image of a gnome, 
conducted us into the narrow galleries, a hundred and fifty feet below the 
surface where we crawled on our hands and knees along passages scarcely 
three feet high, examining the superb strata into which the railway company 
delves for fuel. A railway built over a coal-bed gives its corporation no cause 
for complaint, although, far as the eye can reach, on either hand, there may be 
scarcely a stick of timber to be seen. 

The men and women in these small Missouri towns had a grave, preoccupied 
look, doubtless born of the hard ways of the West. The farming population in 
that section is 
none too prosper- 
ous, and rarely 
has any ready 
money. The im- 
mense dispropor- 
tion between the 
cost of labor and 
implements for 
producing crops, 
and the prices 
of the produce it- 
self, has made sad 
havoc with many 
brilliant pros- 
pects. At that 
time, throughout 
that part of the 
South - west, the 

tillers of the soil were savagely discon- 
tent. Many with whom we conversed 
spoke with great bitterness of the difficulty of obtain- 
ing proper representation in Congress on the 
subject of their grievances. In this first day's journeying it 
was curious to note how the advent of the railway had caused 
whole towns and villages to change their location, and come tumbling 
miles across the prairie, to put themselves in direct communication with the 
outer world. Sometimes, at a little station, we were shown, far off on the 
horizon, a landmark of the village's former site, and told that the citizens one day 
set their houses upon wheels, and had them dragged by long trains of oxen to the 
railway line. For a time everything was in transition; people had to give up 
church on Sundays until the "meeting-house came over to the new village; a 
gambling-hell, and the house of a pious citizen often jogging along for days in 
friendly company. Sometimes a great wind, turning a whole migratory village 




190 



DISCOURAGED COMMUNITIES. 



upside down, would compel the vigorous " bull- whackers" to shout themselves 
hoarse in their efforts to right things. 

Instances of discouraged towns were abundant on every hand. Here and 
there we came to a long street, bordered by white one-story board structures 
and plank walks, and inhabited by a bevy of dejected and annoyed colonists, 
forever cursing their lack of judgment in not having selected the site destined 
to be the great railway city of the South-west. Entering the shop of the 
humblest tradesman, we were at once the centre of an .admiring and awe- 
stricken group, every person in % it manifesting surprise that commerce in that 
especial locality had revived even to the extent of the expenditure of a ten- cent 
scrip. In such towns, the hotel was usually a small, frail, frame structure, kept 
by a giant of a man, with a disappointed face and a sour and envious manner 



it ft £,j 




'A stock -train from Sedalia was receiving a squealing and bellowing freight.'' [Page i<Ji.] 



LOADING A "STOCK"- TRAIN. 



191 




a -?m *- 



"The old Hospital"— Fort Scott. [Page 192.] 



of greeting — a manner grafted upon him by the hard facts of pioneer life, but 
which it was easy to see belied his real nature. The women were silent, im- 
passive, laborious, seeming to have forsworn folly of every kind, and to be delving 
at Nature with desperate will, determined to wrench riches from her, even though 
the golden oppor- 
tunity had moved on. 

After Charles had 
made all tidy for bed 
within the palace-car, 
on the first evening 
of the journey, we 
wandered among the 
drovers and herdsmen 
at one of the great 
stock -yards on the 
railway line. A 
stock -train from Se- 
dalia was receiving a 
squealing and bellow- 
ing freight as we 
reached the yards, 
leading from which to the car door ran an inclined plane. Along the outer side 
of the fence inclosing this plane stood a dozen stout men, armed with long poles 
and pitchforks. Presently the figure of a man sprang out of the darkness. " Is 
your lot ready, Bill?" with an oath. "Yes!" with an oath; and then to the music 
of other oaths innumerable, a mass of struggling, porkers were forced forward to 
the car door. A rain of curses, yells and sharp pitchfork thrusts fell upon their 
defenceless backs. They rushed madly over each other along the crowded way 
into the car, those who lagged behind receiving prods enough to honey-comb an 
elephant's hide. Now and then, before succumbing to the captivity of the car, 
some giant porker would throw down one of his human assailants and give him 
a savage bite — these being none of your luxurious pigs of the civilized sty, but 
sovereign rooters at large brought forth and reared on the prairie. Many a 
drover has carried to his grave the ugly scars given him by Texas steers and 
Missouri swine. 

The next day was Sunday, and the one street of the little town of Appleton, 
where a New York publishing firm has generously built a handsome school-house, 
was lined with tired - looking women and pretty girls moving churchward. 
Rough fellows, who had been occupied all the week with hard labor, mounted 
their ponies and galloped away for a day's hunting. We went on through the 
towns of Nevada and Deerfield to Schell City, a superb location for a fine town, 
and one of the especial favorites of the railway corporation. Thousands of 
acres of rich land are owned there by the company, and many substantial build- 
ings are already in progress. In the afternoon we came to the prosperous little 
town of Fort Scott, in Kansas, stretched along a range of hills lined with coal. 

13 



192 



FORT SCOTT PARSONS. 



Situated directly at the junction of the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Gulf 
railway with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, and crowded with enterprising and 
industrious citizens, Fort Scott is destined to a large prosperity. The Govern- 
ment post there was long ago deserted ; nothing remains of it but a few barrack 
buildings, grouped around a weed-grown square, and the old hospital, which 
decay aids in rendering picturesque. The building of the new Gulf route has 
had a great influence for good upon Fort Scott and the surrounding country ; 
and although the reclamation of lands of the railway company from people who 
claim to have acquired a title to them by occupancy has occasioned some trouble, 
it is expected that a satisfactory arrangement may be reached. 

This was a lawless section but a few years ago; now the security of life 
and property are as great as in any community in the world. The era of 
crime passed with the building of the new railway, and found no inducement to 
linger even for a moment. It has been a sweeping change, this metamorphosis 

of Kansas, from the 
condition of a wild 
territory, whose lands 
were held and inhab- 
ited solely by the In- 
dians driven west of 
the Mississippi, into a 
transplanted New 
England. In 1 8 4 1 
Fort Scott was a post 
with which to hold 
the savages in check ; 
now a full-blooded 
Indian is hardly to be 
met with in the vi- 
cinity. Thirty-five 
miles below Fort Scott 
we came to Osage 

Bridge over the Marmiton River, near Fort Scott. mission, where 3. good 

Jesuit, Father Schumacher, began his labors among the Indians a quarter of a 
century ago ; and from the mission a rapid run of a few miles brought us to 
p arS ons— a thriving town named in honor of the president of the Missouri, 
Kansas and Texas railway. 

Parsons, of course, owes its existence to this road. From the town the route 
extends southward to the Indian Territory and to Texas; and north-west, through 
the thriving towns of Neosho Falls, Burlington, Emporia, and Council Grove, 
the line stretches to Junction City, where the Kansas Pacific joins it. The 
entrepot for the rich regions between the boundary of the Indian Territory and 
the plains, — all the wonderfully fertile Neosho Valley, — it is not surprising that 
the growth of the town has been rapid. Less than a month after Parsons was 
"started," in 1871, upward of one hundred lots, on which parties were pledged 




THE NEOSHO VALLEY. 



193 




A street in Parsons, Kansas. 



to put up buildings worth at least $1,000, had been sold; and at present the 
town boasts good hotels, churches, handsome residences, banks, and large stone 
railway shops. Land has already assumed a marked speculative value in many 
of these towns; but at Parsons, as indeed throughout the Neosho Valley, the 
opportunities for invest- 
ment are still magnificent. 
The town is one of the 
great centres for the trade 
and travel of at least fifty 
thriving towns and villages, 
into which the immigration 
from all parts of the West 
is rapidly flowing. The 
valley offers homes to 
thousands of people, on 
terms which the poorest 
man can accept and fulfill. 
All through this rich 
country there is abundance 
of timber — black walnut, 
ash, maple and oak; and for steam machinery, there is plenty of coal and 
water ; so that the various implements of agriculture, the furniture, the building 
materials, which are now brought hundreds of miles, from St. Louis and Chicago, 
may be manufactured near at hand, the moment shrewd men of capital can 
induce themselves to operate in so promising an enterprise. 

The Neosho Valley is a revelation to one who has never before visited the 
South-west. Miles on miles of wondrously fertile valleys and plains, watered by 

fine streams, along whose banks is a 
heavy growth of timber, are now 
within easy reach by rail. Hundreds 
of cattle, horses and swine wander at 
will through the fields, guarded only 
against straying into the crops by the 
alert movements of the herdsman, 
who, well mounted and accompanied 
by a shepherd dog, spends his whole 
time in the open air. The houses of 
the farmers are usually of logs roughly 
hewn, but carefully put together. 
Shelter of crops being rarely necessary 
in such a climate, the granaries are 
somewhat rudely constructed. A 
corn granary is a tower of logs, built like a boy's cobhouse. No one ever thinks 
of stealing from it. The horses career as they please in the front yard, and look 
in at the parlor windows ; the pigs invade the kitchen, or quarrel with the geese 




A Kansas Herdsman. 



194 



THE KAW INDIANS. 



at the very steps of the houses; but whenever the master of the household thinks 
that discipline has been too seriously infringed, he sends a sprightly dog to 
regulate matters. Pigs are taken by their ears, geese fly screaming away, and 
horses scamper into the distance. 

As we passed through the reservation of the "Kaw" Indians — the Kansas 
aborigines — our artist could not refrain from capturing a few types, and has 
faithfully sketched for us the little grave by the wayside, with the slain horses 
lying upon it, and the flag floating over it, to mark it as the resting-place of a 
chieftain ; the stone house which the graceless Kaw has turned into a stable for 
his pony ; and the warrior galloping across the field in the midst of a pouring 
rain. The Kaws are dirty, lazy, and frequently dishonest beings, — just as far 
from civilization as were their ancestors three hundred years ago. 

They generally refuse to speak English to strangers, and will only converse 
by signs. They still sigh for the time when their forefathers were wont to swoop 




A Kansas Farm - yard. 

down upon the wagon-trains toiling from the Missouri State line to Santa Fe in 
New Mexico, when the traders were almost at the mercy of the tawny banditti, 
until the post of Council Grove, now a flourishing town, was established as a 
general rendezvous, where caravans numbering hundreds of wagons and thou- 
sands of mules could form into processions of sufficient strength to protect 
themselves. 

There were at one time nearly 6,000 men, 18,000 oxen, and 6,000 mules 
engaged in the New Mexico trade, all of whom made Council Grove their head- 
quarters. The villages of the Kaws are remote from the present line of rail, and 
the Indians rarely patronize the road save when, for the pure delight of begging, 
they entreat the conductor for a free passage from one village to another. When 
they are refused the privilege, they break forth into the most violent profanity of 
which the English language is capable. Their vocabulary of English oaths is 
more complete than even that of the native American, who, in many parts of the 
South-west, is charged with violent expletives as a musket is charged with 
powder. 



FORT RILEY A FRONTIER GARRISON. 



195 




: The little grave, with the slain 



At Junction City, which stands in a beautiful valley, where the Smoky and 
Republican rivers join, in a country not so rich as that twenty miles south, yet 
still wonderfully fertile, we were detained by a sudden snow-fall and a miniature 
whirlwind, which blockaded tracks and made travel _ 

impossible. The beautiful Smoky Valley was, there- 
fore, a forbidden domain to us ; and we consoled our- 
selves with a visit to Fort Riley, an important frontier 
post, established in 1852, on the left bank of the Kan- 
sas river, at the junction of the Smoky Hill and Repub- 
lican Forks, and three miles from Junction City. 

General Oakes, in command at the post, welcomed us 
with true South-western hospitality. He was for many 
years stationed in Texas, and has had a rich expe- 
rience of frontier garrison life. This adventurous and 
isolated existence seems to have a charm for all who orses ying upon lt age * 
have adopted it, and very few of the officers take advantage of their furloughs 
to visit the Eastern cities. Ladies, too, find rare attractions in a garrison winter, 
and the forts all along the frontier do not lack good society from November 
until May. At Fort Riley the soldiers support a good little theatre, much 
of the talent for which is furnished by members of the cavalry regiment 
quartered there. Not far from the fort is the " geographical centre of the United 
States," on a hill-top, where stands a monument erected to the memory of 
Brevet-Major E. A. Ogden, founder of Fort Riley. 

We hastened back toward Parsons, again crossing the great Kaw reserva- 
tion, and meeting long trains of Indians, mounted on their shaggy ponies. This 
Neosho Valley line, which we had traversed, was the beginning of the present 
great trunk route from Sedalia to the Gulf. Work was begun on it, under 
a contract with the Land Grant Railway and Trust Company, in November, 
1868, the line to extend from Junction City to Chetopa, on the frontier of 
the Indian Territory, a distance of 1 82 miles ; and it was completed in 
October, 1870. 

While this was in construction, the building of the line from Sedalia to Par- 
sons was begun, and the whole route, 160 miles, was completed early in 187 1. 
Meantime work was going forward, at lightning speed, in the Indian Territory. 
The manager of the line had made a bold stroke in order to be the first to reach 
the Cherokee country, and obtain permission to run a line through it, as well as 

to get conditional land -grants; and in May of 1870 
occurred quite an episode in the history of railway 
building. On the 24th of that month the line had 
reached within twenty-four miles of the southern 
boundary of Kansas. Much of the grading was 
unfinished ; bridges were not up ; masonry was not 
ready. But on the 6th day of June, at noon, the 
"The stone house which the graceless first locomotive which ever entered the Indian 

Kaw has turned into a stable for _ • , . . 1 • 1 r 

his pony." [Page i 94 ] I erntory uttered its premonitory shriek of progress. 




196 



THE INDIAN TERRITORY CHETOPA. 




"The warrior galloping across the fields." [Page 194.] 



In eleven days twenty-six and a-half miles of completed rail were laid, four 
miles being put down in a single day. A grant of over 3,000,000 acres of 
land, subject, under treaty stipulations, to temporary Indian occupancy, has been 
accorded the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway Company, on the line of the 

road in the territory between Chetopa 

■0///ti /_. a and the Red river. The question of the 

M\ future disposition of the Indian Territo- 

y\ ;"''":■•■ , ||p ry is interesting to the railroad builders, 

as they have extended their line through 
the great stretch of country, hoping that 
the fertile lands now waste may come 
into market. Until it is opened to white 
settlement, or until the Indians adopt 
some new policy with regard to their 
lands, the Territory is, in many respects, 
a barrier to the best development of that 
portion of the South-west. The im- 
mense reservation, larger than all New 
England, extending over 60,000,000 
acres, lying between Texas, with her 
1,000,000 settlers, Arkansas, with her hardy 500,000, and Missouri and Kansas, 
with their 2,000,000 of stout frontiersmen, is now completely given over to 
the Indian, and the white man who wishes to abide within its borders will find 
his appeal sternly rejected by an Indian Legislature, unless he marries into 
one of the dusky tribes and relinquishes his allegiance to Uncle Sam. 

A little beyond Chetopa lies a long range 
of low hills. The new Gulf route, cutting 
through them, carries one out of the United 
States and into the Cherokee nation. Here 
the traveler is no longer in the domain of the 
white man ; the Government of the United 
States can protect him only through the fee- 
ble medium of marshals and deputy-marsh- 
als, who exercise their own judgment as to 
whether or not they shall do him justice, the 
nearest towns lying nestled among the hills, 
or in the tall timber on the banks of creeks. 
The railway runs through a seemingly de- 
serted land. Rarely does one see along the 
route the face of an Indian, unless at some of 
the little wooden stations, or at a lone water- 
tank near a stream. The inhabitants have 
acquiesced sullenly in the opening of their 
country to railway travel, but they do not 
build near the line, and rarely patronize it. Mm T£ c^^f^r^ ff" 




XIX. 



THE "INDIAN TERRITORY." 



THE Indian Territory is, to its inhabitants and to the Government of the 
United States, at this present writing, a problem. The area of 52,780,000 
acres has as yet scarcely population enough to make a city of tenth rank. The 
estimated numbers of the tribes scattered over the vast plains and among the 
mountains are as follows: Cherokees, 17,500; Choctaws, 17,000; Creeks, 13,500; 

Chickasaws, 5,500; Semi- 
noles, 2,500; Osages, 
3,500; Sacs and Foxes, 
468; Shawnees, 670; 
Cheyennes and Arapahoes, 
3,390 ; Confederate Peo- 
ries, 170; Eastern Shaw- 
nees, 80; Wyandottes, 150; 
Quawpaws, 236; Senecas, 
188. And this little band 
of 65,000 people is so 
separated by great distan- 
ces, unabridged by rail- 
language and custom, that there is hardly any 
The land lies waste because there are not hands 




An Indian Territorial Mansion. 



ways, and by barriers of 

intercourse between tribes. 

enough to hold the plough, and the country remains a wilderness because the 

Indian jealously refuses to allow the white man to make it blossom as the rose. 

There is something pathetic in the resolution with which the Indian clings to 
this Territory, the very last of his strongholds. His race and his history are soon 
to be inextricably mingled with that of the white men, whom he still considers as 
intruders; and while he recognizes the inevitable fate attending him and his 
possessions, he fiercely repulses any attempt at a compromise. 

He now stands firm by the treaty stipulations; for the treaties made in 1837 
by the Government of the United States with the various tribes east of the 
Mississippi, giving them the " Indian Territory," on condition that they should 
move into and occupy it, were comprehensive and binding. The Osages had 
been the virtual owners of these immense tracts of land until the advent of the 
white man, but to-day have almost entirely disappeared. 

To the Cherokees, in 1837, a patent in fee simple was given, while the other 
tribes held their lands under treaty stipulations. From 1837 to 1845 the task of 
removing the various tribes from their homes east of the Mississippi went on, and 



^8 TREATIES THE CHEROKEES INDIAN AGENTS. 

with the unwillingness of the Seminoles to migrate came the Florida war. In 
the treaties it was provided that the five distinctive tribes, the Cherokees, Choc- 
taws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, should hold the lands of the Territory 
as homes forever. They, in their turn, have allowed smaller tribes to make 
homes among them. In 1866, the Delawares and Shawnees of Kansas agreed to 
live thereafter in the Cherokee* Nation, and to give up their own nationality, 
adding the funds resulting from the sale of their Kansas lands to the annuities of 
the Cherokees. 

The annuities of the various nations in the Territory arise from their sales of 
lands in the past; those of the Cherokees amount to about $350,000 yearly; of 
the Choctaws, $250,000; the Creeks, $175,000; the Chickasaws, $100,000; and 
the Seminoles, $10,000. The various treaties were all revised and renewed in 
!866 — following on the "Treaty of Amity" made at Fort Smith, at the close of 

the late war. 

The Indians of the Territory of to-day are, therefore, just as securely vested 
with the control of the Territory as against its settlement by white men as they 
were in 1837, and they manifest no more disposition to yield their claims than 
they did a quarter of a century ago. 

The Cherokees have naturally made the greatest advances in civilization, and 
are at present the most powerful of all the tribes in the Territory. They have a 
ruling voice in matters that concern the general polity of the nations, or tribes 
of the Territory, and their manners and customs are better known to the outside 
world than are those of any other tribe. 

Their general status is not below that of the white frontiersmen. They 
are industrious and capable agriculturists, and understand the care of stock 
better than any other people in the South-west. They live remote from each 
other— on farms which, it is true, they hold in common, yet to which there is 
an individual and perpetual right of occupancy. All the land is vested in the 
Nation ; a man may sell his improvements and buildings — but not the land. 

The Indians throughout the Territory are not, as a rule, farmers in any proper 
sense, as they raise simply what they need ; this, however, is because there is no 
market for surplus produce. The Government originally supplied them with 
capital ; they do not realize the advantages of gain, they simply desire to " make 
a living." Throughout the various nations there is an utter neglect of internal 
improvements. An Indian highway is as difficult as the Vesuvian ascent, and 
none of the magnificent rivers were bridged before the advent of the Missouri, 
Kansas and Texas railway. 

The " Indian Agents " — who are appointed directly by the President, and 
who, residing among the different tribes, are properly the interpreters of all the 
treaties, have charge of the annuities, and make the annual reports — usually 
have much influence with the Indian chiefs, and, of late years, some few improve- 
ments have been introduced at their suggestion. The person of an agent is 
always respected, and as a rule his word is law. 

The government of the Cherokees, as well as that of the other principal 
nations in the Territory, corresponds in large degree to those of our States. The 



TAHLEQUAH GOVERNMENT THE IMMIGRATION QUESTION. 



199 




A Creek Indian. 



Cherokees elect a "principal" and second chief for four years. They also have 
an upper and lower house of the Legislature, the former continuing in power four, 
the latter two years. Bills, or acts, are regularly introduced, and passed through 
the various readings to be engrossed, as in other Legislative assemblies. There 
is a supreme court, with three judges, and there are also 
district judges and sheriffs. 

At Tahlequah, the capital, the annual sessions of the 
legislature are held in the council-house, beginning in 
November, and lasting thirty days. The legislators are 
paid out of the annuities of the nation. Tahlequah is an 
average town of the South-west, with nothing especially 
denoting its Indian origin. The Choctaws and Creeks 
have the same general form of government. The Creeks 
are a fine people ; their women are handsome, and their 
men generally brave and honest. The Seminoles have 
vested their executive authority in twenty-four band- chiefs, 
all of whom are controlled and directed by a "principal," 
who is an absolute autocrat, having an irrefragable veto- 
power. All the tribes or nations join in a general council, 
provided for by the treaty of 1 866, and it is presided over 
by the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern Superintendency. 
At this council only such matters are legislated upon as are of comity between 
the nations — the rendition of criminals, the joint action in regard to land, etc. 

This superb country, unquestionably one of the most fertile on the globe, is a 
constant source of torment to the white men of the border, in whom the spirit of 
speculation is very strong. The hardy 
citizen of the South-west bears no ill- 
will toward the various Indian tribes, 
but it irritates him to see such vast 
tracts of land lying idle. He aches to 
be admitted to the Territory with the 
same privileges granted Indian citizens, 
viz. : the right to occupy and possess 
all the land they may fence in, and to 
claim all that remains unfenced within 
a quarter of a mile on either side of 
their fenced lots. He is crazed with 
visions of the far-spreading, flower- 
bespangled prairies, the fertile foot- 
hills, the rich quarries, mines, and 
valley-lands. He burns to course at 
free will over the grazing regions 
where even the Indians raise such fine 
stock. And now that the railroad has 
entered a protest against continued 




Bridge across the North Fork of the Canadian River, 
Indian Territory (M., K. & T. Railway). 



200 



THE CHEROKEE FEUD WAR IN THE TERRITORY. 




An Adopted Citizen. 



exclusiveness on the part of the Indians, he thunders at the northern and 
southern entrances of the Territory, and will not be quiet. 

At the time of the emigration of the Cherokees to the Indian Territory, a 
powerful feud existed between two influential families in the nation — the Rosses 

and the Ridges. It grew out of dissatisfaction at a 
treaty made by the Ridge party. Those hostile to 
the treaty claimed that the Ridges and others had 
agreed to sell a portion of the Territory to the Uni- 
ted States, contrary to the instructions of the nation. 
A vendetta followed, in which Boudinot, Ridge, 
and all the parties to the treaty were killed, save 
Stand Weatie, who succeeded in defending himself, 
single-handed, against a dozen murderous assail- 
ants. On the wave of indignation against the 
Ridges and the other parties to this odious treaty, 
the Ross party came into power, and has since 
achieved considerable distinction both by its lead in 
the affairs of the whole Territory and by its loyalty 
to the Government during the late war. 

At the beginning of the war, the Indians of the 
various tribes in the Territory were naturally in closer relations with the South 
than with the North. Their agents had mainly been Southern men, and the 
annuities, by which they had become rich and independent, had been derived 
from the South, and paid promptly. 

Most of the Indians knew nothing whatever concerning Northern people or 
politics. They had been residents of a slave-holding section all their lives. 
Many of the Cherokees had 200 or 300 slaves each, and negroes who had 
settled among the Indians also held slaves. In May of 1862, when the great 
struggle was gravely accentuated, the Indians took sides with the South, a regi- 
ment being formed among the Cherokees, and placed under the command of 
General Stand Weatie, a full-blooded Indian. 

The principal chief, John Ross, used his utmost endeavors to prevent any of 
the tribes from further engaging in the struggle. There was presently an engage- 
ment between the United States troops and the Cherokee regiment, at Pea 
Ridge, in Arkansas. A portion of the Cherokees at that time threw down their 
arms, and returned to their allegiance to the General Government. William P. 
Ross, the present chief, was among them, and his father, continuing his loyal 
efforts, went to Washington, and gave a true statement of the situation. He 
remained loyal until his death, which occurred in Philadelphia, in 1864. 

To General Albert Pike was principally due the conversion of most of the 
Indians in the Territory to Southern sentiment. The Confederates made better 
treaties with the Indians than ever the United States had made, and even paid 
them one annuity in Confederate money. 

Meantime the fair lands underwent all the ghastly and appalling disasters 
which follow in the train of war. They were occupied alternately by Northern 



THE STORY OF OPOTHLEHOLA STOCK-RAISING. 



20I 



and Southern armies, and were plundered by both. The Indian adherents of 
the Southern cause moved their families into Texas, and those who had cast 
their fortunes with the Government stampeded into Kansas. 

The departure of the loyal Indians for the loyal States was the signal for a 
determined attack upon them, and was the cause of almost unparalleled suffering 
among the women and children. At one time there were fifteen thousand 
refugees in Kansas, all supported by the General Government, while hundreds 
were daily arriving in a starving condition. 

The story of Opothlehola, chief of the Creeks, furnishes one of the most 
striking instances of determined loyalty. The Creeks had long been beset by 
General Pike, who had finally succeeded in inducing a certain number of them 



to go South. But the 
chief Opothlehola, then 
nearly one hundred years 
old, and reverenced with 
almost superstitious awe 
by the masses of his 
people, rejected all Pike's 
advances, and, after a 
long and stormy council, 
called on all who wished 
to seek the Great Father's 
hand to go northward 
with him. 

He hastily gathered 
such of his young men 
and warriors as would join 
him, with their wives and 
children, and in mid- 
winter, with but few pro- 
visions, and dragging all 
their household goods, 
the loyal refugees set 
forth for Kansas. They 
were followed by Pike 




An Indian Stock-Drover. 



and regiments from Texas, 
and a bloody battle en- 
sued at Honey Springs, 
in which, as in a suc- 
ceeding fight, Opothleho- 
la's little band was routed 
with much slaughter. 

But they continued on 
until January, 1863, when 
those who remained alive 
reached Kansas in an 
almost famished condi- 
tion. On the dread march 
more than a thousand 
men, women and children 
sickened, died, and were 
left by the wayside. 
When the old chieftain 
reached Kansas, his first 
act was to enroll his war- 
riors as soldiers of the 
United States, and every 
able-bodied man enlisted 
in the service ! Opothle- 



hola died shortly afterward, at Fort Leavenworth, where he was buried with 
military honors. The various regiments from the territorial tribes on both sides 
in the war were good soldiers. When they were led well, they fought well. 
They waged relentless war on one another. The feud is still nourished to some 
extent, and will be until this generation has gone its way. 

Before the war the Indians were rich in stock, and it was not uncommon for a 
well-to-do stock-raiser to possess 15,000 head of cattle; while it was a very poor 
and woe-begone Indian, indeed, who had not at least twenty. Then, as now, all 
the labor necessary was the branding of the beasts, as they grazed at will over 
the unbounded lands. 



202 



INDIAN CUSTOMS AND HABITS. 




* 



But when the war came, the total destruction of this stock ensued ! Hund- 
reds of thousands of the beasts were stolen, and taken into the neighboring 
States : both armies fed from the herds ; and so great was the consequent decline 
of prosperity, and the distress, that the General Government appropriated money 

for the purchase of new stock, and now the tribes 
have nearly as much as before the war. The only 
present subject of disagreement among any of the 
tribes is the land question ; the various propositions 
tending to an opening up of the land to white 
settlement, which have been made by one party, 
having all been received with disdainful threats by 
the other. Death is the speedy fate of any Indian 
of any tribe who dares to accede to approaches 
on the part of the white man tending to the sale 
of lands ; and the white man who attempts to 
ingratiate himself too freely among the Indians 
runs risk of a sudden and mysterious disappearance. 
Religion is creeping into the simple yet logical 
minds of the various tribes. There are no previous 
impressions to correct, for these tribes have no 
mythology, save the gracious and beautiful embody- 
ing of some of nature's loveliest forms. After the 
war, the Cherokees invited the missions and their 
schools to return to the Territory, and the other 
tribes followed their example. 

There are few, if any, church edifices among the 
tribes, and the meetings are now held in school^ 
houses. Church expenses are borne by voluntary gifts. Many of the tribes seem 
to have a dim idea that they are fragments of one of the " lost tribes of Israel," 
and the Choctaws have a fund of curious legends concerning the wanderings of 
their forefathers which tend to that belief. 

Manners and superstitions are, of course, in many respects still thoroughly 
Indian. Games in which physical strength and skill are required are popular 
among all the tribes, and the ball-players are fine specimens of men. Hospi- 
tality is unbounded, and as soon as an Indian of wealth and station takes a 
wife, all her relatives, even the most distant, come to live on his estate, and 
remain forever, or until they have impoverished him. The tyranny of mothers- 
in-law in the Territory is something frightful to contemplate. One Indian gave 
as his reason for not wishing to get rich the torments which his relatives, in 
case he married, would cause him. 

Food is simple among all the "nations." Corn, ground with mortar and 
pestle, furnishes the material for bread ; a few vegetables are grown; and game, 
pork and beef are abundant. 

The hog of the Indian Territory is a singular animal. Having always run 
wild, he is as distinguished for thinness as are his brethren of civilization for 



:v 



1%, 



" The ball-players are fine specimens 
of men." 



MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY RELATION. 



203 



corpulence, and his back well merits the epithet of razor-edge applied to it. 
Stock feeds itself, winter and summer, and there is rarely a season when it is 
necessary to put up any hay. In the winter of 1871 grass along the Arkansas 
bottom was green until the middle of December. 

Marriage is gradually becoming a recognized institution among all the tribes, 
the efforts of the missionaries tending to encourage it; but heretofore men and 
women have simply cohabited without formal tie and reared families. The usual 
practice has been for a young man who has become enamored of a maiden to 
ingratiate himself with her brother, or with a near male relative, and for the 
latter to intercede with the father. Should the father regard the suitor favorably, 
he puts him on probation, and at the end of a certain term receives him, and 
presents him to the daughter as her future husband. The family relation seems 
much respected, and is guarded against disorganization by many excellent laws. 




A Gentleman from the Arkansas Border- 



XX. 



RAILROAD PIONEERING— INDIAN TYPES AND CHARACTER. 

AFTER leaving Chetopa, a pretty town, with nearly 2,000 inhabitants, and a 
point of supply for territorial traders, our special train steamed merrily 
along the broad expanse of prairie until Vinita, the junction of the Atlantic and 
Pacific line with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railway, was reached. At 
Vinita, the junction has made no growth, because white men are not allowed to 
live there, and the Indians content themselves with agriculture and hunting. 
We had prepared ourselves for a sojourn of a fortnight between this point and 





Limestone Gap— Indian Territory. [Page 212.] 

the Red river, and a brief inspection of the 
culinary department, over which the ebony Charles 
presided, was eminently satisfactory. Telegrams 
were received from various gentlemen at each end 



CHEROKEE BEAUX — GIBSON STATION. 



205 



of the main line, stating that they would join us at Fort Gibson, and we set 
out on our journey with delightful anticipations. 

The long grasses rustled ; the timber by the creeks stood out in bold relief 
against the Naples-blue of the sky ; the distant line of mounds assumed the 
appearance now of a giant fortification, now of a city, and now of a terraced 
garden ; here and there a gap in the woods lining the horizon, showed a glimpse 
of some far-reaching valley, on whose bosom still lay a thin snow- veil ; and 
sometimes we saw a symmetrical tree standing midprairie, with a huge white- 
hooded hawk perched lazily upon a bending bough, and a gaunt wolf crawling 
away from the base. But nowhere was there any sign of man. 

The train halted for water and coal, the engineer and firemen helping them- 
selves at the coal- cars and water- tank, and we moved on. At last, at a little 
wooden station, we saw half-a-dozen tawny youths, tall and awkward, with high 
cheek-bones, intensely black hair, and little sparkling eyes, which seemed the 
very concentration of jealousy. This was a party of young beaux from the 




"Coming in the twilight to a region where great mounds reared their whale-backed heights." 

nearest Cherokee village. They wore the typical American slouch hats,: but 
had wound ribbons around and fastened feathers in them ; their gay ly- colored 
jackets were cut in fantastic fashion, and at their sides they carried formidable 
revolvers, which they are, however, slower to use than is the native American. 

They stared curiously at our party, seated in luxurious chairs on the ample 
platform of the rear car, and, after having satisfied their curiosity, they mounted 
their horses and galloped away. So we rattled on, coming in the twilight to a 
region where great mounds reared their whale-backed heights on either hand. 
Upon the summit of one of them stands a monument of hewn stone, doubtless 
to some deity who went his ways long before Columbus uncovered America to 
European eyes. These mounds seem constructed according to some general 
plan, and are of immense extent. 

We went on in the deepening twilight until we came to Gibson station, the 
limit of our journey for the day. Only one or two houses were to be seen ; a 



206 



STORIES OF TROUBLES WITH "-TERMINUS" RUFFIANS. 




A "Terminus" Rough. 



cold wind blew over the prairie, and we betook ourselves to the supper- table, 

where prairie-chickens, mysteriously purveyed for our surprise by the beneficent 

Charles, sent up a savory steam. The stillness of death reigned outside, and we 

listened languidly to the conductor's 

stories of "terminus troubles" a brace of 

years agone, until we were aroused to 

welcome delegations brought by the night 

express trains from each way to join our 

party, and to prepare for the morrow. 
When we were all snugly tucked up 

in our berths in the gayly - decorated 

sleeping-saloon, one of the new-comers 

began dreamily to tell stories of more 

terminus troubles. " Not much as it was 

when we were here and at Muskogee in 

1870," he said. "Three men were shot 

about twenty feet from this same car in 

one night at Muskogee. Oh ! this was a little hell, this was. The roughs took 

possession here in earnest. The keno and monte players had any quantity of tents 

all about this section, and life was the most uncertain thing to keep you ever saw. 
" One nieht a man lost all he had at keno ; so he went around behind the 

tent and tried to shoot the keno-dealer in the back ; he missed him, but killed 

another man. The keno man just got a board and put it up behind himself, and 

the game went on. One day one of the roughs took offence at something the 

railroad folks said, so he ran our train off the track next morning. There was no 

law here, and no means of getting any. As fast as the railroad moved on, the 

roughs pulled up stakes and moved with it. 

" We tried to scare them away, but they did n't 
scare worth a cent. It was next to impossible for a 
stranger to walk through one of these canvas towns 
without getting shot at. The graveyards were sometimes 
better populated than the towns next them. The fellows 
who ruled these little terminus hells, — where they came 
from nobody knows — never had any homes — grew up 





'We came to the bank of the Grand river, on a hill beyond which was the post of Fort Gibson." [Page 208.] 



THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR AND THE "ROUGHS." 207 

like prairie grass, only coarser and meaner. They had all been ' terminuses ' 
ever since they could remember. Most of them had two, three, and four murders 
on their hands, and confessed them. They openly defied the Indian authorities, 
and scorned Uncle Sam and his marshals. They knew there was money 
wherever the end of the road was, and they meant to have it." 

" But how long did this condition of affairs continue ?" 

" It went on steadily until the Secretary of the Interior came down here to see 
the Territory and to examine the railroads. He came down in this same car, and 
was carefully informed of all the lawlessness and flagrant outrages which decent 
people had been obliged to submit to. One night the superintendent-in-chief 
pushed on a little ahead of the train to get a physician, as a gentleman in the 
special car was taken suddenly ill. The roughs captured the superintendent 
and proposed to shoot him, as they fancied that he was a United States 
marshal. He explained who he was, however, and begged off. As they 
hardly dared to shoot him then, he succeeded in reaching a physician, got back 
to the train, and next took the Secretary to inspect this specimen of railroad 
civilization." 

" And what did the Secretary see ?" 

" Oh, all the ruffians flocked to hear what he had to say. They had killed 
a man that morning from mere caprice, and he was laid out in a little tent which 
the party passed while looking around. One after another of the rough fellows 
was presented to the party, each one speaking very plainly, and declaring that he 
had a good right to stay in the ' Nation,' and (with an oath) meant to; and he'd 
like to hear any one hint that he had better go away. Then they told stories 
of their murderous exploits, practiced at marks with their revolvers, and seemed 
to have no fear of the Secretary." 

" What was the result ?" 

" Well, the Secretary of the Interior took a bee-line for the nearest telegraph 
station, and sent a dispatch to General Grant, announcing that neither life nor 
property was safe in the Territory, and that the Indians should . be aided in 
expelling the roughs from their midst. So, in a short time, the Tenth Cavalry 
went into active service in the Territory." 

" Did the ruffians make any resistance ?" 

" They got together, at the terminus, armed to the teeth, and blustered a 
good deal ; but the cavalrymen arrested one after another, and examined each 
man separately. When one of the terminuses was asked his name, he usually 
answered that it was Slim Jim, or Wild Bill, or Lone Jack (with an oath), and 
that he was a gambler, or a 'pounder,' as the case might be, and,' furthermore, 
that he did n't intend to leave the Territory. Whereupon the officer commanding 
would say : ' Well, Slim Jim, or Wild Bill, or Lone Jack, I '11 give you twelve 
hours to leave this town in, and if you are found in the Territory a week from 
this date, I'll have you shot !' And they took the hint." 

A moment afterward, the same voice added : 

" By the way, at the next station, Muskogee, a man was shot before the town 
got there, and the graveyard was started before a single street was laid out. You 
14 



208 



FORT GIBSON, A CHEROKEE TOWN, 



can see the graveyard now-a-days — eleven men are buried there with their boots 
on. Good night." 

The landscape was snow-besprinkled next day, but our merry party of six 
climbed into a rickety ambulance, and set out on the seven miles' ride to Fort 
Gibson. As we rattled along past the dense bosquets, great flocks of prairie- 
chickens rose in leisurely flight; wild turkeys waddled away; deer fled across 
the roads after bestowing a scornful gaze upon us; and rabbits jumped painfully 
in the snow. 

The farm-houses which we passed were all built of logs, but were large and 
solidly constructed ; and the Indian farmers were making preparations for the 
Spring ploughing. When we came to the bank of the Grand river, on a hill 
beyond which was the post of Fort Gibson, we found the ferries obstructed by 
masses of floating ice. Negro cavalrymen from the fort were in midstream, 
desperately clinging to the guide-rope, and in imminent danger of being carried 
down river and out into the mighty Arkansas. At last, the dangers over, two 



lazy half- breeds ferried 
us across, after infinite 
shouting and disputing; 
and we met, on the other 
bank, "Uncle John" Cun- 
ningham, postmaster at 
Fort Gibson. "I saw you 
across the stream, and 
was watching out for you 
a little carefully," said 
Uncle John, " for there's 
a fellow come into town 
this morning with six 
gallons of whiskey, and 
we expect some of the 




Indians to go circusing 
around as soon as they 
get it down." 

We climbed the hill 
to the fort, a well-built 
post usually garrisoned 
by three companies either 
of infantry or cavalry. 
Fort Gibson is the resi- 
dence of the present chief 
of the Cherokee nation, 
William P. Ross, a culti- 
vated and accomplished 
gentleman, whom I had 



a Negro Boy at the Ferry previously met in Wash- 

ington. The fort stands on the Grand river, about two and a-half miles from its 
confluence with the Arkansas, and is only twenty-one miles from Tahlequah, the 
capital of the Cherokees. The whole of the adjacent country, except upon the 
high range of the hills along the Grand, Verdigris and Illinois rivers, is arable 
and easy to cultivate. 

From the verandah of the commanding officer's quarters at the fort, one 
can overlook a range of hills known as the " Boston mountains," the town, 
set down in an amphitheatre formed by the slopes, the broad, swift river running 
between its picturesque banks, — a charming scene. 

At Fort Gibson we were in a real Cherokee town, and at every turn saw one 
of the tall, black-haired, tawny citizens of the Territory. It was evidently a 
market-day with the farmers for many a mile around. Horses were tied before 
the porches of the Indian traders and along the bank of the river, and every few 
moments some stout Indian came rattling into town, his wife mounted behind 
him on the demure -looking pony, equal to anything, from the fording of a river 



THE INDIANS' TASTE FOR STIMULANTS. 



209 




to the threading of a canon. Many 
of the men carried side-arms, but 
none of them showed any disposi- 
tion to quarrel, and we saw no one 
who seemed to have been drinking 
liquor. Indeed, so severe are the 
penalties attaching to the sale of 
ardent spirits in the Indian Terri- 
tory, that men do not care to 
take the risk. The United States 
marshals and the Indian authorities 
pursue the offenders with great per- 
sistence, and a law-breaker rarely 
escapes. 

The Indians — Cherokees, Choc- 
taws, Chickasaws and Seminoles — 
all have a strange thirst for intoxi- 
cating liquor, and often make the 
most astonishing efforts to secure it. 
All kinds of patent medicines in 
which alcohol forms an ingredient 
find ready sale among the various 
tribes ; and camphor, pain - killer, 
and similar articles, were for a long 
time so much in use among the 
Cherokees as to provoke an exam- 
ination by the agents, who discov- 
ered the braves to be drinking 
whole bottles at a gulp, in order to 
feel some effect therefrom. A bottle 
of whiskey is still one of the most 
powerful bribes that can be placed 
before an Indian. 

The women were all robust, and 
not devoid of a certain wild beauty ; 
but they wore a prim, Shakerish 
costume which defied criticism. A 
poke -bonnet nearly concealed their 
features, and a stiff, heavy robe fell 
down to the ankles, while a shawl 
was decorously draped about the 
shoulders. Many of the Indians 
seemed to have negro wives, and 
we saw more than one stalwart 
negress receiving courteous atten- 



2IO 



CHEROKEE FACES — AN OUTBURST. 



tion from tall, copper-colored beaux, whose manners would have done no dis- 
credit to a salon in society. 

The men, as a rule, would not respond when addressed in English, and often 
turned sullenly away ; while younger members of the tribes, both boys and 
girls, would chat cheerily, and question us with childish curiosity as to our 
reasons for visiting the nation. There were some superb heads among these 
Cherokees, with masses of tangled hair peeping in most charming confusion from 
under torn hats, slightly shaded faces, with matchless eyes, and features in which 
the Indian type of a century agone was yet preserved — all the reserve, all the 
immobility, all the silent scorn being still distinctly marked. Yet civilization 
was beginning to do its work. The greater number of countenances were losing 
their savage traits, and becoming more like those of their fellows in the neighbor- 
ing States ; still there was a certain atmosphere of strangeness about them, born, 

doubtless, of their methods 

of thought, their traditions, 

their almost complete lack of 

sympathy with the whites. 

Never until the war had they 

been called upon to feel that 

their territory constituted a 

part of a common country ; 

now they realize it. 

From Fort Gibson, where 

Lieutenant- Colonel Lawson, 

the amiable commanding 

officer, and his associates had 

made our stay a very pleasant 

one, we rode back along the 

very rough roadways until we 

The station-agent came to see us, and announced that 
some of the "Indians had been having a circus" during our absence. "Came in 
here, an old woman did," he said, " with a butcher-knife, and took a piece out 
of my chair, and a man with her fired half-a-dozen shots from his revolver 
through the roof. But I finally quieted 'em." Liquor, or possibly pain-killer, 
was the cause of this sudden outburst. 

So we journeyed slowly on through the great Territory, now coming into the 
shadows of the prehistoric mounds, and now into delightful valleys, which needed 
only human and tasteful occupancy to be transformed into veritable Elysian 
Fields. At night the train was switched off at some lonely siding, and the 
baggage- car transformed into a kitchen. Then arose the complicated aroma of 
broiled venison, savory coffee, and fried potatoes and muffins, or delicate toast, — 
the work of the dusky Charles, who could growl fiercely whenever profane eyes 
attempted to peer into the arcana of the kitchen. One of the leading citizens of 
Parsons, Kansas, presided over the venison ; half-a-dozen eager hands conducted 
the coffee from the mill in which it was ground into the cup in which it was 




"They wore a prim, Shakerish 
costume." [Page 209.] 

came to Gibson station. 




A Trader among the Indians. 



MUSKOGEE RAILWAY BRIDGES CREEK SCHOOLS. 



211 



poured; and the "pet conductor" watched over the comfort of all, generously- 
forgetting his own. Late o' nights a thunderous roll and a flash of light would 
salute our ears and eyes, and sometimes a bundle of letters and home papers, 
fresh from St. Louis and the East would be handed us out of the darkness by 
the conductor of the "down express." 

Our train was always in motion when we awoke in the morning, reminding 
us more of life on an ocean steamer than on the "rattling rail-car." We spent 
some time at Muskogee, the railway station communicating most directly with 
Fort Gibson, and a town which owes all its present prosperity to the Missouri, 
Kansas and Texas railway. Immense stock- yards have been built there, and the 
arrival and departure of goods and mails for Ocmulgee, the capital of the Creek 
nation, forty-five miles to the westward, and We-wo-ka, the capital of the Semi- 
noles, one hundred miles west, gives employment to large numbers of men. 
Here, too, is a point of debarkation for travel to Armstrong's Academy, the 
Choctaw seat of government; and to Tishomingo, the principal town in the 
Chickasaw nation. Stage routes branch out in all directions from Muskogee, 
and weekly mails are forwarded thence to the interior. 

Between Gibson and Muskogee we had crossed the Arkansas river on one 
of the immense bridges of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railway, a grand 
triumph of engineering skill ; and some miles below Muskogee we also crossed 
the "North Fork" and the "Canadian," both of which run through a singularly 
wild and beautiful, country. Near the Canadian we crossed the fields to visit 
one of the mission schools, of which there are numbers in the Territory. It is in 
the Creek domain, and is known as the " Asbury Manual Labor School," being 

supported by the Methodist Church South. 
About eighty Indian children of both sexes 
are boarded, lodged, and taught at this 
institution, and the school-rooms which we 
entered were models of order and comfort 
The native Creek schools, of which there 




"The Asbury Manual Labor School," in the Creek domain. 



are twenty or twenty-five, are not very useful ; even the examining boards are 
deficient, and the native teachers are only able to give ordinary elementary 



212 EDUCATION IN THE TERRITORY LIMESTONE GAP. 

instruction. The mission schools throughout the Territory have" been of great 
service. The Presbyterians also support a mission among the Creeks, called the 
"Tallahassee Manual Labor School," where, as in the Asbury, work afield and 
in the house is expected from the scholars. The pupils of the Asbury School 
in one season produced 2,000 bushels of corn from about fifty acres. 

In the Cherokee nation much attention is paid to the thirty "neighbor- 
hood schools," as they are called, and all the Northern missionaries who, of 
course, were compelled to retire during the war, were invited to return to their 
posts, and received cordial welcome, when peace was re-established. The 
common schools among the Cherokees were established by the Legislature in 
1867. There are schools set apart for colored children, but no spirit of exclu- 
sion is now manifested ; for the Indians, when the war closed and they emanci- 
pated all their slaves, frankly placed them on the same basis with themselves. 
Five orphans are boarded, clothed and instructed in each of the public schools. 

Once in two years a superintendent of schools is chosen, and he appoints a 
board of directors' for each school. The district schools are mainly taught by 
women, and those pupils who desire more than an elementary education are sent 
to colleges in the South and West. The Choctaws support forty youths and 
twenty maidens in institutions at Louisville, Kentucky, and other Southern cities. 
Various influences are gradually doing away with the desire to retain the 
Indian language in the schools. The Seminoles have thus far established five 
common schools, and a missionary boarding-school, under the charge of the 
Presbyterian Church. This little tribe is improving as rapidly in material 
wealth and in education as any other in the Territory. 

On the Canadian river is a town which has at various times possessed the 
euphonious appellations of " Sandtown" and "Buzzard's Roost." It is now 
merely a collection of roofless cabins, but was long the rendezvous of all the 
ruffians infesting the Territory. Perched on a waste near the river's side, it was 
a convenient location for murder and plunder, and travelers learned to give it a 
wide berth. 

Passing Perryville, an old trading-post of the Choctaws, and now a station of 
some promise ; then along the picturesque and fertile line of Ream's Valley, a 
magnificent region ; dashing through the wonderful coal region near McAllister, 
we came at last to Limestone Gap. 

From Limestone Gap to the Red river the country is wonderfully fertile, and 
in summer beautiful beyond description. Towns of more or less promise are 
interspersed with solitudes which are very impressive. Stringtown is to be one 
of the lumber markets of the future; and at Caddo, one of the curious new 
towns which are plenty in the vicinity of the Texan frontier, the Fort Sill trade 
debouches, and with the building of a branch railway to Paris, the cotton from 
that town and other points in Northern Texas will come in. 

The railroad runs over trestle-work of the most difficult character between 
A-to-ka and South Boggy, which latter town was once the capital of the 
Choctaw nation. Not far from the banks of the Red river, on the Indian side, 
a small town has grown up, and the Texas Central railroad will soon cause the 



A PROFITABLE FERRY — A GLIMPSE AT SOME IMMIGRANTS. 213 

growth of a hamlet on the opposite side. The river, at the point where it is 
crossed by the railroad, on a superb bridge, is not grand, although the banks are 
high and stony. There is usually but a small volume of water in the stream, 
and the sands show on either side. 

Not far from the railway bridge we saw a long line of cattle fording the 
channel ; and the answer to our inquiry as to the reason why no bridge had been 
constructed by the Texas and Indian Governments at those points was that a 
Chickasaw Indian had long ago secured legislative privilege to charge one dollar 
for each person crossing the river from either direction, at the very point most 
available for bridge-building. The income of this Indian has, for some years, 

been $100 per day, while the working expenses 
of the ford are not more than $20 weekly. 

As our train lay in the shadow of the hills at Lime- 
stone Gap that night, the express from St. Louis went 
thundering by, and we were awakened to catch a 
glimpse of cars filled with weary emigrants, their faces 
eagerly turned toward the South. Ere I slept again, 
I followed them in fancy on their journey to the Gulf. 
Now they were hurried through sharply - defined 

hill ranges, and deep, 
sequestered, fertile 
valleys, until, the last 
creek crossed, the last 
forest of the Territory 
dominated, the fickle 
stream that marks 
the Texan boundary 
was reached; then, on 
through new forests, 
where a gnarled, 
unprofitable growth 
rankly asserted itself ; 
and now over up- 





The Toll -Bridge at Limestone Gap, Indian Territory. 



lands, whose black earth needs but a caress to bring forth abundant harvest. 

Now through thickets where Spanish moss hung in hundred fantastic forms 
from the trees it feeds upon ; past immense fields, where thousands of cattle were 
grazing ; by banks and braes, in summer-time dotted and spangled with myriads 
of flowers; along highways where horsemen rode merrily. Now the train 
rushed through a still, old town, where negro children were playing about the 
doors of the dirty, white houses, or a stalwart negress, with a huge bundle on her 
head, was tramping in the shade of friendly trees ; and now along the borders of 
a marsh in which a million frogs were croaking a dreary burden, their monoton- 
ous chorus rising out of little pools from which the flag-lily raised its defiant head. 

Or now the train stopped where one could see, in the tremulous air of 
evening, the reflection of the dying sun in a little lake nestling among the trees, 



214 SCENES ALONG THE IMMIGRANT'S ROUTE TO TEXAS. 

with Spanish graybeards dipping into its clear depths; now where a path wound 
tip a hill-side, and a magnolia tree stood lonely, its green leaves giving promise 
of future bloom and perfume, and its coarse bark sending forth a subtle odor; 
now where sombre creeks stole in and out among the crooked trees, as if eager 
to furnish seductive nooks for the brown, gray and red birds which fluttered and 
hovered and hopped from a thousand twigs. 

Or now where the mesquite quivered in the glare of the generous Texan 
sun ; where the voices of negroes were heard in loud refrain, singing some bois- 
terous melody as they loitered home from their half-completed tasks, the urchins 
somersaulting on the elastic earth ; and now where the shadows in the distance 
were strangely lighted up by the erratic glow of the moon, which threw a fan- 
tastic glamour on moss and thicket, on lily, magnolia, and live oak. 



XXI. 



MISSOURI — ST. LOUIS, PAST AND PRESENT. 



MISSOURI is the child of a compromise whose epitaph was written in letters 
of blood. Her chief city was founded more than a century ago, by a 
colony of adventurous Frenchmen ; and for many years, during whose lapse the 
title to its soil was savagely disputed by Gaul and Indian, was a fur-trading post 




"Looking down on the St. Louis of to-day, from the high roof of the Insurance temple." [Page 217.J 



When Laclede Liguest and the brave band of men who followed him set out 
from New Orleans, in 1763, to explore the country whose exclusive trade had 



2l5 



MISSOURI LACLEDE LIGUEST's EXPLORATIONS. 



been accorded them by charter from the hands of the governor of the province 
of Louisiana, the lands west of the Mississippi were unexplored and unknown. 
Beyond the mouth of the Missouri river the bateau of no prying New Orleans 
trader had ever penetrated. The song of the voyageur was as yet unheard 

by the savage ; and the inhabitants of the 



little post of Sainte Genevieve looked 
with amazement and reverence upon the 
trappers, hunters and merchants who 
started from their fort, one autumn 
morning, to explore the turbid current 
of the Missouri. 

Laclede Liguest and his men did 
not long remain in the mysterious 
region adjacent to the junction of the 
two great rivers, but speedily returned 
to the site of the present city, and 
there, early in 1764, a few humble 
cabins were erected, and the new set- 
tlement was christened St. Louis, in 
honor of the dissolute and feeble Louis 
XV., of France. A hardy and fearless 
youth named Auguste Chouteau was 
left in command of the few men pro- 
tecting the infant town, and at once 
began negotiating with the Missouri Indians, who came in large bodies to visit 
the strangers, and to learn their intentions. 

The treaty by which all the French territory on the Mississippi's eastern bank, 
save New Orleans, was ceded to the English, had just been made ; scarlet- coated 
soldiers were daily expected at the forts near St. Louis. Laclede Liguest did 
not dream that another cession, embracing all lands west of the Mississippi, had 
been made to the king of Spain, and that his pet town was actually upon Spanish 
soil ; he was happy in the belief that the banner of France would flaunt in the 
very eyes of the hated English, and was delighted to find that the Indians who 
surrounded him were resolved to fight the soldiers of Great Britain to the death. 
So he merrily extended the limits of his colony ; but had been at work hardly 
a year before he received orders from the governor of Louisiana to surrender to 
Spain. The governor himself was so chagrined at the orders he was compelled 
to communicate, that he died of a broken heart soon after ; and Laclede 
Liguest, mute with rage at the pusillanimous conduct of the Home Government, 
remained stubbornly at his post, ignoring Spanish claims. The French from all 
the stations east of the Mississippi took refuge with him, when the English came 
to their homes, and St. Louis grew more and more Gallic until 1768, when the 
Spanish came in, and after several unsuccessful attempts to gain the confidence 
of the early settlers, finally quite disregarded their feelings, and in 177° pulled 
down the French flag. 




"Where now stands the great stone Cathedral." [ Page 217.] 



COLONIAL DAYS UPPER LOUISIANA- BECOMES AMERICAN. 



217 



In that year the French had consecrated their little log church, built on the 
land where now stands the great stone cathedral, and in that humble edifice they 
assembled to mourn the loss of their nationality, and to listen to the counsels of 
peace given them by their priests. The Spanish commanders finally succeeded 
in fraternizing with the French, and cordially joined them in hating the English. 

Laclede Liguest died during a voyage down the Mississippi, and was buried 
in the wild solitudes at the mouth of the Arkansas river. His immense proper- 
ties in St. Louis were sold to strangers. His valiant lieutenant, Auguste 
Chouteau, became his administrator, and a few years afterward the Chouteau 
mansion was built in the field where now there is a continual roar of traffic. 

Thenceforward, through the bloody days of the colonial revolution, St. Louis 
experienced many vicissitudes. It underwent Indian massacres ; suffered from 
the terrorism of the banditti haunting the Mississippi ; began gradually to get 
acquainted with the gaunt American pioneers who had appeared on the eastern 
bank of the Father of Waters; and in 1788 had more than 1,000 inhabitants. In 
those days it was scoffingly called "Pain Court" (short bread), because grain 
was expensive, and the hunters who came to the "metropolis" to replenish their 
stock of provisions got but scant allowance of bread for their money. 

The Osages were forever hanging upon the outskirts of the settlement, and 
many an unfortunate hunter was burned at the stake, impaled, or tortured slowly 
to death by them. Toward the close of the last century, however, the inhabit- 
ants pushed forward into the wilderness, and the fur trade increased rapidly. 
Numerous neat, one-story cottages, surrounded by pretty gardens, sprang up in 
St. Louis. France once more recovered her possessions west of the Mississippi ; 
and in 1804 the settlement which Laclede Liguest had so carefully founded, 
hoping that it might forever remain French, came under the domination of the 
United States. 

A formal surrender of Upper Louisiana was made to the newly enfranchised 
American colonies ; the stars and stripes floated from the " Government House"' 
of St. Louis ; and the 
Anglo-Saxon came to the 
front, with one hand ex- 
tended for a land grant, 
and the other grasping a 
rifle, with which to exter- 
minate Indian, Spaniard 
or demon, if they dared 
to stand in his way. 

Looking down upon 
the St. Louis of to-day, 
from the high roof of the 
superb temple which the 
Missourians have built to 
the mercurial god of in- 
surance, One Can hardly The Old Chouteau Mansion (as it was.) 




218 



THE ST. LOUIS OF TO-DAY. 




The St. Louis Life Insurance Company's Building. 



believe that the vast metropolis spread out before him represents the growth 
of only three-quarters of a century. The town seems as old as London. 
The smoke from the Illinois coal has tinged the walls a venerable brown, and the 
grouping of buildings is as picturesque and varied as that of a continental city. 

From the water-side, on ridge after 
ridge, rise acres of solidly-built houses, 
vast manufactories, magazines of com- 



merce, long avenues bordered with 
splendid residences. A labyrinth of 
railways bewilders the eye ; and the 
clang of machinery and the whirl of a 
myriad wagon-wheels rise to the ear. 
The levee is thronged with busy and 
uncouth laborers ; dozens of white 
steamers are shrieking their notes of 
arrival and departure ; the ferries are 
choked with traffic ; a gigantic and 
grotesque scramble for the almost lim- ' 
itless West beyond is spread out 
before one's vision. 

The town has leaped into a new 
life since the war ; has doubled its population, its manufactures and its ambition, 
and stands so fully abreast of its wonderful neighbor, Chicago, that the tradi- 
tional acerbity of the reciprocal criticism for which both cities have so long 
been famous is latterly much enhanced. 

The city which now stretches twelve miles along the ridges branching from 
the water-shed between the Missouri, the Meramec and the Mississippi rivers, 
flanked by rolling prairies richly studded with groves and vineyards ; which has 
thirty railroad lines pointed to its central depots, and a mile and a-half of steam- 
boats at its levee, 1,000 miles from the sea; whose population has increased from 
8,000, in 1835, to 450.000, in 1874; which has a banking capital of $ 1 9,000,000 ; 
which receives hundreds of thousands 
of tons of iron ore monthly, has 
bridged the Father of Waters, and 
talks of controlling the cotton trade 
of Arkansas and Texas — is a giant 
in comparison with the infant settle- 
ment wherein, in a rude cottage, 
Colonel Stoddard had his head-quar- 
ters when the United States assumed 
territorial jurisdiction. In those days 
the houses were nearly all built of 
hewn logs, set upon end, and covered 
with coarsely shingled roofs. The 

tOWn then extended along the line Of ''In those days the houses were nearly all built of hewn logs. 




OLD ST. LOUIS — PROGRESS SINCE THE LATE WAR. 219 

what are now known as Main and Second streets ; a little south of the square 
called the Place d'Armes, Fort St. Charles was held by a small garrison, and in 
the old stone tower which the Spaniards had built, debtors and criminals were 
confined together. 

French customs and French gayety prevailed ; there were two diminutive 
taverns, whose rafters nightly rang to the tales of hair-breadth escapes told by 
the boatmen of the Mississippi. The Chouteaus, the Lisas, and the Labbadies 
were the principal merchants ; French and English schools flourished ; peltry, 
lead and whiskey were used for currency, and negroes were to be purchased for 
them ; the semi -Indian garb of the trapper was seen at every street corner ; and 
thousands of furs, stripped from the buffalo and the beaver, were exported to New 
Orleans. The mineral wealth lying within a hundred miles of St. Louis had 
hardly been dreamed of; the colonists were too busy in killing Indians and 
keeping order in the town, to think of iron, lead, coal and zinc. 

The compromise which gave the domain of Missouri to slavery checked the 
growth of the State until after it had passed through the ordeal of the war. 
How then it sprang up, like a young giant, confident of the plenitude of its 
strength, all the world knows ! St. Louis, under free institutions, has won more 
prosperity in ten years than under the old regime it would have attained in fifty. 

It is now a cosmopolitan capital, rich in social life and energy, active in com- 
merce, and acute in the struggle for the supremacy of trade in the South-west. 
The ante-bellum spirit is rarely manifested now-a-days ; progress is the motto 
even of those men of the old school who prayed that they might die when they 
first saw that "bleeding Kansas" had indeed bled to some purpose, and that a 
new era of trade and labor had arrived. The term " conservative" is one of 
reproach in St. Louis to-day ; and the unjust slur of the Chicagoan, to the effect 
that the Missouri metropolis is " slow," puts new fire into the blood of her every 
inhabitant. 

After the ravages of the war, both State and city found themselves free from 
the major evils attendant upon reconstruction, and entered unimpeded upon a 
prosperous career. The 100,000 freedmen have never constituted a troublesome 
element in the State ; no political exigencies have impeded immigration or 
checked the investment of capital ; and the commonwealth, with an area of more 
than 67,000 square miles of fertile lands, with 2,000,000 of inhabitants, and 
$1,100,000,000 worth of taxable property; with 1,000 miles of navigable rivers 
within her territory and upon her boundaries, and with vast numbers of frugal 
Germans constantly coming to turn her untilled acres into rich farms, can safely 
carry and in due time throw off the various heavy obligations incurred in the 
building of the railway lines now traversing it in every direction. The present 
actual indebtedness of the State is nearly $19,000,000, for more than half of 
which sum bonds have been issued. 

The approaches to St. Louis from the Illinois side of the Mississippi are not 
fascinating, and give but a poor idea of the extent of the city. Alighting from 
some one of the many trains which enter East St. Louis from almost every 
direction, one sees before him a steep bank paved with " murderous stones," and 



220 



EAST ST. LOUIS SCENES ON THE LEVEE. 



the broad, deep, resistless current of the great river, bearing on its bosom tree 
trunks and branches from far-away forests. 

East St. Louis stands upon famous ground ; its alluvial acres, which the 
capricious stream in past times yearly overflowed, have been the scene of many 
fierce contests under the requirements of the so-called code of honor, and its 
sobriquet was once "Bloody Island." It is now a prosperous town; hotels, 
warehouses and depots stand on the ancient dueling ground ; immense grain 
elevators and wharves have been erected on soil which the river once claimed as 
its own. Huge ferry-boats ply constantly across the river; but the railway 
omnibuses and the ferry-boats are soon to be but memories of the past, as the 
graceful arches of the new bridge testify. 




"The crowd awaiting transportation across the stream has always been of the most cosmopolitan and motley character.' 



The crowd awaiting transportation across the stream has always been of the 
most cosmopolitan and motley character. There may be seen the German emi- 
grant, flat-capped and dressed in coarse black, with his quaintly attired wife and 
rosy chilnren clinging to him; the tall and angular Texan drover, with his defiant 
glance at the primly dressed cockneys around him; the "poor white" from some 



THE RIVER-SIDE PANORAMA. 221 

far Southern State, with his rifle grasped in his lean hand, and his astonished 
stare at the extent of brick and stone walls beyond the river ; the excursion party 
from the East, with its maps and guide-books, and its mountains of baggage ; the 
little groups of English tourists, with their mysterious hampers and packets, 
bound toward Denver or Omaha ; the tired and ill-uniformed company of troops 
" on transfer " to some remote frontier fortress ; the smart merchant in his car- 
riage, with his elegantly dressed negro driver standing by the restive horses ; the 
hordes of over-clothed young commercial men from the Northern and Western 
cities, with their mouths distended by Havana cigars, and filled with the slang of 
half-a-dozen capitals ; and the hundreds of negroes, who throng the levees in 
summer, departing in winter like the swallows, at the slightest hint of snow, or of 
the fog which from time to time heightens the resemblance of the Missouri 
capital to London. 

Before the bridge was built, the levee on each side of the river was a kind of 
pandemonium. An unending procession of wagons, loaded with coal, was always 
forcing its way from the ferry-boats up the bank to the streets of St. Louis, the 
tatterdemalion drivers urging on the plunging and kicking mules with frantic 
shouts of " Look at ye!" "You dar!" These wagons, in busy days, were con- 
stantly surrounded by the incoming droves of stock, wild Texan cattle, that with 
great leaps and flourish of horns objected to entering the gangways of the ferry, 
and now and then tossed their tormentors high in the air ; and troops of swine, 
bespattered with mud, and dabbled with blood drawn from them by the thrusts 
of the enraged horsemen pursuing them. Added to this indescribable tumult 
were the lumbering wagon-trains laden with iron or copper, wearily making their 
way to the boats; the loungers about the curbstones singing rude plantation 
songs, or scuffling boisterously ; the nameless ebb-tide of immigration scattered 
through a host of low and villainous bar-rooms and saloons, whose very entrances 
seemed suspicious ; and the gangs of roustabouts rolling boxes, barrels, hogs- 
heads, and bales, from wagon to wharf, and from wharf to wagon, from morning 
to night. 

Below the bridge, trie river, gradually broadening out, was covered with 
coal-barges and steam-tugs, and above it, along the banks, one saw, as one still 
sees, dark masses of homely buildings, elevators, iron foundries, and various 
manufactories ; while along the shore are moored thousands of logs, fastened 
together in rafts. 



XXII. 



ST. LOUIS GERMANS AND AMERICANS — SPECULATIVE 
PHILOSOPHY — EDUCATION. 



THE old French quarter of St. Louis is now entirely given up to business, 
and but little of the Gallic element is left in the town. Some of the 
oldest and wealthiest families are of French descent, and retain the language 
and manners of their ancestors ; but there are few exterior traces of French 
domination. Souvenirs still remain ; streets, both English and American in 
aspect, bear the names of the vanished Gauls. Laclede has a monument in the 
form of a mammoth hotel ; and the principal outlying ward of the city, crowded 

with vast rolling-mills, and iron 
and zinc-furnaces, is called Carondelet. 
On the Illinois side of the river the 
village of Cahokia still lingers, a moss- 
grown relic of a decayed civilization, 
its venerable church, Notre Dame des 
Kahokias, being the most ancient 
building in the West. But not one of 
the great circular stone towers, erected 
in early times as defences against the 
Indians, remain; block-houses and 
bastions have been replaced by mas- 
sive residences, in which live the 
merchant princes of the day. 

" The Hill " is traversed in every 
direction by horse railroads; and a few 
The Court -House— St. Louis. minutes' ride will take one from the 

roar of business into a quiet and elegant section, where there are miles of 
beautiful and costly dwellings. As the ridges rise from the river, so rise the 
grades of social status. Mingled with the wholesale establishments, and the 
offices of mining and railway companies in Main and Second streets, parallel 
with the river, are hundreds of dirty and unhealthy tenement houses ; on Fourth, 
and Fifth, and Sixth streets, and on those running at right angles with them, are 
the principal hotels, the more elegant of the shops and stores', the fashionable 
restaurants, and the few places of amusement which the city boasts ; beyond, on 
the upper ridges, stretching back to Grand avenue, which extends along the 
summit of the hill, are the homes of the wealthy. 

The passion for suburban residences is fast taking possession of the citizens of 
St. Louis, and several beautiful towns have sprung up within a few miles of the 




STREET LIFE IN ST. LOUIS. 



223 



city, all of which are crowded with charming country houses. Lucas Place 
is the Fifth avenue of St. Louis, and is very rich in costly homes surrounded by 
noble gardens. The houses there have not been touched by the almost omni- 
present smoke which seems to hover over the lower portion of the town. In 

Lucas Place lived the noted Benton, 
and there he foamed, fretted, planned 
his duels, nourished his feuds, and 
matured his magnificent ideas. The 
avenues which bear the names of 
Washington, Franklin, Lindell, Mc- 
Pherson, Baker, Laclede and Chouteau 
all give promise of future magnificence. 
St. Louis is not rich in public 
buildings, although many of the recent 
structures devoted to business are 
grand and imposing. The hotels 
partake of the grandeur which dis- 
tinguishes their counterparts of other 
cities; on Fourth and Fifth streets 
there are many elegant blocks. 

The street life is varied and at- 
tractive, as in most southern towns ; 
and the auction store is one of the 
salient features which surprise a 
stranger. The doors of these estab- 
lishments are open from sunrise until midnight, and the jargon of the auctioneer 
can be heard ringing loudly above the rattle of wheels. The genius who 
presides behind the counter is usually some graduate of the commerce of the 
far South; Accustomed to dealing with the ignorant and unsuspecting, his 
eloquence is a curious compound of insolence and pleading. He has a 
quaint stock of phrases, made up of the slang of the river and the slums of 
cities, and he begins by placing an extravagant price upon the article which he 
wishes to sell, and then decreasing its value until he brings it down to the range 
of his customers. 

On Saturday evenings the street life is as animated as that of an European 
city. In the populous quarters the Irish and Germans throng the sidewalks, 
marketing and amusing themselves until midnight ; and in the fashionable sec- 
tions the ladies, seated in the porches and on the front door-steps of their man- 
sions, receive the visits of their friends. 

A drive through dozens of streets in the upper portion of the city discloses 
hundreds of groups of ladies and gentlemen thus seated in the open air, whither 
they have transferred the etiquette of the parlor. A far more delightful and 
agreeable social freedom prevails in the city than in any Eastern community. The 
stranger is heartily welcome, and the fact that most of the ladies have been 
educated both in the East and the West, acquiring the culture of the former 
15 




Thomas H. Benton (for thirty years United States 
Senator from Missouri). 



224 THE GERMAN ELEMENT. 

and the frankness and cordiality of the latter, adds a charm both to their con- 
versation and their beauty. 

At the more aristocratic and elegant of the German beer gardens, such as 
" Uhrig's " and " Schneider's," the representatives of many prominent American 
families may be seen on the concert evenings, drinking the amber fluid, and 
listening to the music of Strauss, of Gungl, or Meyerbeer. Groups of elegantly 
dressed ladies and gentlemen resort to the gardens in the same manner as do the 
denizens of Dresden and Berlin, and no longer regard the custom as a dangerous 
German innovation. 

The German element in St. Louis is powerful, and has for the last thirty 
years been merging in the American, giving to it many of the hearty features 
and graces of European life, which have been emphatically rejected by the 
native population of the more austere Eastern States. In like manner the Ger- 
man has borrowed many traits from his American fellow- citizens, and in another 
generation the fusion of races will be pretty thoroughly accomplished. 

There are more than fifty thousand native Germans now in St. Louis, and the 
whole Teutonic population, including the children born in the city of German 
parents, probably exceeds one hundred and fifty thousand. The original 
emigration from Germany to Missouri was largely from the thinking classes — 
professional men, politicians condemned to exile, writers, musicians, and philoso- 
phers, and these have aided immensely in the development of the State. 

The emigration began in 1830, but after a few hundreds had come out it fell 
off again, and was not revived until 1848, when the revolution sent us a new 
crop of patriots and statesmen, whose mother country was afraid of them. 
Always a loyal and industrious element, believing in the whole country, and in 
the principles of freedom, they kept Missouri, in the troublous times preceding 
and during the war, from many excesses. 

The working people are a treasure to the State. Arriving, as a rule, with 
little or nothing, they hoard every penny until they have enough with which to 
purchase an acre or two of land, and in a few years become well-to-do citizens, 
orderly and contented. The whole country for miles around St. Louis is dotted 
with German settlements ; the market gardens are mainly controlled by them ; 
and their farms are models of thorough cultivation. 

In commerce they have mingled liberally with the Americans; names of both 
nationalities are allied in banking and in all the great wholesale businesses ; and 
the older German residents speak their adopted as well as their native tongue. 
At the time of my visit, a German was president of the city council, and bank 
presidents, directors of companies, and men highly distinguished in business and 
society, who boast German descent, are counted by hundreds. 

German journalism in St. Louis is noteworthy. Carl Schurz and his life-long 
friend and present partner, Mr. Pretorius, are knoVn throughout the country as 
distinguished journalists, and have even, as we have seen in these later days, 
played no small role upon the stage of national politics. 

The failure of the Liberal Republican movement rather astonished the masses 
of the Germans in Missouri, who had the most unwavering confidence in the 



GERMAN SOCIAL LIFE THE OPERA BREWERIES. 225 

ability of Schurz to accomplish whatever he chose ; and has left them somewhat 
undecided as to what course to pursue in future. There are four daily German 
newspapers in St. Louis, one of which has been recently planted there by the 
Catholics, who have also started a clever weekly, in the hope of aiding in the fight 
against the new principles put in force by the Prussian Government — principles, 
of course, largely reflected among the Germans in America. The sturdy intel- 
lectual life of the Teuton is well set forth in these papers, which are of great ability. 

The uselessness of the attempt to maintain a separate national feeling was 
shown in the case of the famous " Germania" Club, which, in starting, had for its 
cardinal principle the non-admission of Americans ; but at the present time there 
are 200 American names upon its list of membership. The assimilation goes on 
even more rapidly than the Germans themselves suppose ; it is apparent in the 
manners of the children, and in the speech of the elders. 

German social and home life has, of course, kept much of its original flavor. 
There are whole sections of the city where the Teuton predominates, and takes 
his ease at evening in the beer garden and the arbor in his own yard. At the 
summer opera one sees him in his glory. 

Entering a modest door- way on Fourth street, one is ushered through a long 
room, in which ladies, with their children, and groups of elegantly dressed men 
are chatting and drinking beer, into the opera-house, a cheery little hall, where 
very fashionable audiences assemble to hear the new and old operas throughout 
a long season. The singing is usually exceedingly good, and the mise en scene 
quite satisfactory. Between the acts the audience refreshes itself with beer and 
soda-water, and the hum of conversation lasts until the first notes of the orchestra 
announce the resumption of the opera. On Sunday evenings the opera-house is 
crowded, and at the long windows of the hall, which descend to the ground, one 
can see the German population of half-a-dozen adjacent blocks, tiptoe with 
delight at the whiff of stolen harmony. 

The "breweries" scattered through the city are gigantic establishments, for 
the making of beer ranks third in the productive industries of St. Louis. Iron 
and flour precede it, but a capital of nearly $4,000,000 is invested in the manu- 
facture, and the annual productive yield from the twenty-five breweries is about 
the same amount. Attached to many of these breweries are concert gardens, 
every way scrupulously respectable, and weekly frequented by thousands. 

The Germania and Harmony Clubs, and a hundred musical and literary 
organizations use up the time of the city Germans who are well-to-do, while 
their poorer brethren delve at market gardens, and are one of the chief elements 
in the commerce of the immense and picturesque St. James Market, whither St. 
Louis goes to be fed. The Irishman is also prominent in St. Louis, having crept 
into the hotel service, and driven the negro to another field. 

The operation of the German upon the American mind has been admirably 
exemplified in St. Louis by the growth of a real and noteworthy school of 
speculative philosophy in the new and thoroughly commercial capital, at whose 
head, and by virtue of his distinguished preeminence as a thinker, stands William 
T. Harris, the present superintendent of the city public schools. Mr. Harris, 



226 



WILLIAM T. HARRIS — SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY. 



during his stay at Yale, in 1856, met the venerable Alcott, of Concord, and was 
much stimulated by various conversations with him. At that time he had 
studied Kant a little, and was beginning to think upon Goethe. 

The hints given him by Mr. Alcott were valuable, and some time afterward,, 
when he settled in St. Louis, and came into contact with Germans of culture and 
originality, his desire for philosophical study was greatly increased and strength- 
ened. In 1858 he became engaged in teaching, for eight years conducting one 
of the city graded schools. 

The first year of his stay in St. Louis he studied Kant's " Critique of Pure 
Reason," without, as he says, understanding it at all. He had been solicited and 
encouraged to these studies by Henry C. Brockmeyer, a remarkable and brilliant 
German, and so enthusiastic for Kantian study that he awoke a genuine fervor 
in Mr. Harris. They arranged a Kant class, which Mr. Alcott on one occasion 
visited, and in a short time the love for philosophical study became almost 



fanaticism. A num- 
ber of highly cul- 
tured Germans and 
Americans com- 
posed the circle, 
whose members had 
a supreme contempt 
for the needs of the 
flesh, and who, after 
long days of labo- 
rious and exhaustive 
teaching, would 
spend the night 
hours in threading 
the mysteries of 
Kant. In 1858 Mr. 
Harris claims that 




William T. Harris, editor of the St. Louis 
Speculative Philosophy." 



'Journal of 



they mastered Kant, 
and between that 
period and 1863 
they analyzed, or, as- 
he phrases it, ob- 
tained the keys 
to Leibnitz and 
Spinoza. The result 
of this long study 
is written out in 
what Mr. Harris 
calls his " Introduc- 
tion to Philosophy," 
in which he deals 
with "speculative 
insights." Every 
one, he claims, will 



have the same insight into Kant, Leibnitz and Spinoza as he did, by reading his 
"Introduction." He already has a large number of followers, many of whom, 
according to his confession, apply his theories better than he does himself: and 
his Journal of Speculative Philosophy, started boldly in the face ' of many 
obstacles, has won a permanent establishment and gratifying success. 

Among the most prominent members of the Philosophical Society, definitely 
organized in 1864, were Mr. Brockmeyer, J. G. Werner, now a probate judge, 
Mr. Kroeger (a stern, unrelenting philosopher, enamored of Fichte, translator of 
the "Science of Knowledge," and author of a "History of the Minnesingers"), 
George H. Howison, now in the Boston Institute of Technology, and Mr. Thomas 
Davidson, one of the most profound students of Aristotle in this country. Mr. 
Brockmeyer is the accomplished translator of Hegel's "Logic." 

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy was prompted in this wise : Mr. 
Harris wrote a " Critique upon Herbert Spencer's First Principles," which was 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF ST. LOUIS. -227 

offered to The North American Review, but the editors failed to discover any- 
thing in it save that it was very audacious, and returned it to the author. Mr. 
Harris thereupon boldly started his own journal in April of 1867. The publica- 
tion is gaining ground in this country, and has won a very wide and hearty 
recognition in Germany and among thinking men throughout Europe. 

Mr. Harris has been an indefatigable worker, as well as a deep thinker, for a 
score of years. The impetus given by him and his confreres to the growth of a 
deep and pure literature in the West and South is as yet too little appreciated. 
A brilliant talker, a man of great originality, and of positive genius for analysis, 
he is fitted to shine in the brightest of the world's capitals, but loves his South- 
western home, and will doubtless remain in it. The teachers grouped around 
Mm in his work of directing the schools of the new metropolis are brilliant men 
and women, thoroughly in love with their work, and animated by his inspiring 
presence with the proper spirit. 

The Germans have, as a rule, frankly joined hands with the Americans in the 
public schools, and have imparted to them many excellent features, The compo- 
site system differs largely from that in vogue in other cities. There is, of course, 
a very large Catholic population in St. Louis, but it is pretty evenly balanced by 
German skepticism. 

The city public schools are utterly secular in their teaching, but, notwith- 
standing that fact, the priesthood makes constant and successful efforts to keep 
Catholic children from them ; and wherever a new public school building is 
erected, Holy Church speedily buys ground and sets up an institution of her 
own. The Catholic laity of St. Louis, however, are, perhaps, if they spoke their 
real sentiments, in favor of the public schools; and there has been a vast advance 
toward liberalism on their part within the last few years. The Catholics have 
eight or nine out of the twenty-four members of the school board, and of course 
have much to say. 

It is wonderful that in a capital where the population is so little gregarious, 
and where, up to last year, it has been so comparatively indifferent to lecture 
courses, such an earnest interest should be taken in the schools by all classes. 
All the powers relating to the management of the schools are vested in a corpo- 
rate body called " the Board of President and Directors of the St. Louis Public 
Schools," the members of the board to be elected for terms of three years. The 
school revenue is derived from rents of property originally donated by the Gene- 
ral Government, by the State school fund, and from taxes of four mills on the 
dollar on city property, the yearly income from these sources averaging 
perhaps $700,000. The school board has authority to tax to any amount. 

Between the district and the high schools there is a period of seven years, 
during which the pupil acquires a symmetrical development admirably fitting 
him for the solid instruction which the finishing school can offer. But out of 
forty thousand children enrolled upon the public school list, only about two and 
a-half per cent, enter the high school. The feature of German- English instruc- 
tion has become exceedingly popular, and the number of pupils belonging to the 
classes increased from 450 in 1864-65, to 10,246 in 1871-72. The phonetic 



228 



GROWTH OF SCHOOLS CATHOLIC PROGRESS. 



system of learning to read was introduced in the primary schools in 1866, and 
has been attended with the most gratifying results. 

The city acted wisely in introducing the study of German, as otherwise the 
Teutonic citizen would doubtless have been tempted to send his child to a 
private school during his early years. Now native American children take up 
German reading and oral lessons at the same time as their little German fellow- 
scholars ; and in the high school special stress is laid upon German instruction 
in the higher grades, that the pupils may be fitted for a thorough examination 
of German science and literature. 

The growth of St. Louis is so rapid that the school board has been compelled 
to build several large new school buildings annually, each capable of containing 
from seven to eight hundred pupils. The introduction of natural science into the 

district schools is indicative of liberal 
progress. Normal schools in St. Louis 
and at Kirksville and Warrensburg are 
annually equipping splendid corps of 
teachers. The public school system 
throughout the State is exceedingly 
popular, judging from the fact that a 
quarter of a million of children attend 
the schools during the sessions. 

The State fund appropriated to 
school purposes is usually large, and 
although there have been objections to 
local taxation for school support in 
some of the counties, the taxes have 
generally been promptly paid. The 
largest and finest edifices in such 
flourishing cities as St. Joseph, Kansas 
City, Sedalia, Clinton, Springfield, 
Mexico, Louisiana, and Booneville are 
usually the " school- houses ;" and in 
Kansas City, which was without railroad communication in 1865, the school build- 
ings are now as complete, elegant, and large as any in Boston or Chicago. The 
School of Design in St. Louis, conducted by Mr. Conrad Diehl, is rapidly growing, 
and has already won enviable praise in the most cultured art circles of the East. 
The Catholic population within the archdiocese of St. Louis is certainly very 
large, probably numbering two hundred thousand persons ; and from this popula- 
tion at least twenty-five thousand children are furnished to the one hundred 
parish schools attached to the various churches in the diocese. None of these 
schools receive any aid from the common school fund, and the pupils are in 
every way removed from the influences of secular education, and made a class by 
themselves. 

It is estimated that the Catholics now own more than four million dollars' 
worth of church and school property in Missouri; and in their various colleges, 




The High School— St. Louis. 



UNIVERSITIES IN THE STATE. 



229 




convents, seminaries, and academies in St. Louis and the other large cities of the 

State they have at least fifteen hundred students. They have kept well abreast 

of the ti(|e of secular education, and bid it open defiance on all occasions, while 

the skeptical and easy-going German 

laughs at their zealotry, and the 

American shuts his eyes to their ira?^ -^* 

growing power. 

Vast as is the growth of colleges 
and schools of various other denom- 
inations, such as the Baptist, the 
Methodist, and the Methodist Epis- 
copal Church South, the Catholics 
keep even with them all. Ever since 
old Gribault, the first pastor in St. 
Louis, led his little flock of five 
hundred Frenchmen to the altar, 
Mother Church has been bold, domi- 
nant, defiant in the young capital of 
the West. 

In St. Louis I was especially in- 
terested in "Washington University," Washington University— St. Louis. 

conducted by Rev. Dr. Eliot, so long pastor of the First Unitarian Church in that 
city. The institution has had a superb growth since its founding in 1853-54, 
despite the unfortunate intervention of the war, and now has more than eight 
hundred students in its various branches. Nourished by generous gifts from the 
East, it has made great progress in its departments of civil and mechanical 
engineering, mining and metallurgy, and architecture, and its law department is 
ably supported. 

To that section of the University devoted to the special education of women, 
known as " Mary Institute," the flower of Missourian girlhood annually repairs. 
The University seems to have had an almost mushroom growth; yet its culture is 
solid and substantial. The State University is located at Columbia, and has also 
been characterized by a remarkable growth since the war. During the struggle 
its buildings were occupied by United States troops, and its sessions were entirely 
broken up ; the library was dispersed, the warrants, of the institution were afloat 
at a discount, and various prejudices had nearly ruined it. 

At last Rev. Dr. Daniel Read took the presidency ; and the reorganized 
University comprises a normal college, an agricultural and mechanical college, 
opened in 1870, law and medical schools, and a department of chemistry, and 
now has attached to it a "school of mines and metallurgy," established at Rolla, 
in South-eastern Missouri. Into this mining school students flock from all direc- 
tions, turning their attention toward a scientific development of the mineral 
'resources of the State. Women have finally been admitted to the University, 
and, at the commencement of 1872, a young lady was advanced to the baccalau- 
reate grade in science. 



XXIII. 

COMMERCE OF ST. LOUIS — THE NEW BRIDGE OVER THE 

MISSISSIPPI. 



THE midsummer heats, during which I visited the Exchange of St. Louis, 
seem to make but little difference with the ardor and energy of its mem- 
bers. The typical July day in the Missourian capital is the acme of oppressive 
heat ; before business hours have begun, the sun pours down bewildering beams 
on the current of the great river, on the toiling masses at the levee, and along 
the airless streets rising from the water-side. 

The ladies have done their shopping at an early hour, and gone their ways ; 
paterfamilias seeks his Avernus of an office, clad only in thinnest of linen, 
and with a palm-leaf fan in his hand ; a misty aroma of the ices of Hellery or 
Gregory floats before him as he seats himself at his desk, and turns over the 
voluminous correspondence from far Texas, from the vexed Indian Territory, 
from the great North-west, from Arkansas, or from the hosts of river towns with 
which the metropolis does business. 

At eleven the sun has become withering to the unaccustomed Easterners, but 
the St. Louis paterfamilias dons his broad straw hat, and, proceeding to the 

" Merchants' Exchange," a 
large circular room into 
which the thirteen hundred 
members vainly try each 
day to cram themselves, he 
makes his way to the corner 
allotted to his branch of 
trade, and patiently swelters 
there until nearly one o'clock. 
In this single room every 
species of business is trans- 
acted ; one corner is devoted 
to flour, a second to grain, 
a third to provisions, a 
fourth to cotton, etc. 

A whirlwind of fans as- 

The new Post- Office and Custom-House in construction at St. Louis. toffisheS the Stranger Specta- 

tor ; people mop their foreheads and swing their palm-leaves hysterically as they 
conclude bargains ; and, as they saunter away together to lunch, still vigor- 
ously fan and mop. The tumult and shouting is not so great as in other large 




COTTON TRADE OF ST. LOUIS A RAILROAD CENTRE. 23I 

cities, but the activity is the same; the participants from time to time refreshing 
themselves at great cans filled with sulphur water. But in a few years the mag- 
nificent new Exchange building, which will be, in many respects, the finest on 
the continent, will be completed, and trade will not only be classified, but will 
have far greater facilities for public transactions than at present. 

St. Louis has determined to become a leading cotton market, and, in view of 
the new railroad development ministering directly to her, it seems probable that 
she will take position among the cotton marts of the world. The opening of 
Northern Texas, and of the whole of Arkansas, to immediate connection by rail 
with the Missourian capital, and the probability — alas, for the faithlessness of 
nations! — of white settlement and increase of cotton culture in the Indian Ter- 
ritory, will give a back-country capable of producing millions of bales annually 
for St. Louis to draw upon. She will eventually become a competitor with 
Houston, Galveston, and New Orleans for the distribution of the crop of the 
South-west, and has already, as she believes, received sufficient encouragement 
to justify the building of large storehouses along the line of the Iron Mountain 
railroad. 

A good deal of the cotton once handled in New Orleans has lately been 
going to New York by rail, and the St. Louis merchants and factors are now 
using a " compress," by means of which 23,000 pounds of cotton can be placed 
in a single freight car. The city is receiving only 40,000 to 60,000 bales 
annually, but confidently counts on several hundred thousand as soon as it has 
perfected arrangements for transportation. It will, without doubt, control the 
cotton in certain sections of Arkansas, and the southern portions of Missouri, and 
can make very seductive bids for the crops of many sections of Texas. 

To draw the attention of cotton- growers toward the St. Louis market, the 
Agricultural Association recently offered premiums of $10,000 for the best 
specimens of various grades of cotton. The Atlantic and Pacific, the Missouri, 
Kansas and Texas, the St. Louis and South-eastern, the Mobile and Ohio, and 
the Iron Mountain roads will probably bring large quantities of cotton to St. 
Louis in the future. The testimony of many of the planters of Northern 
Texas is that their shipments to St. Louis have been far more satisfactory 
than those to Galveston. 

St. Louis is emphatically the railroad centre of the Mississippi valley, being 
the actual terminus of no less than fourteen important railroads, while at least 
thirty are pointed toward her. By all the railroads and by river routes she 
received, in 1872, nearly 4,000,000 tons of freight, being a vast increase over her 
receipts of 1871, and shipped 2,009,941 tons. In 1872 the railroads alone 
brought her nearly 800,000 tons of coal. In 1872 she expended $7,000,000 in 
new buildings, and in 1873 about $8,000,000. 

Through her vast elevators, four of which are located along the banks of the 
Mississippi, and one of which has a capacity of 2,000,000 bushels, passed more 
than 28,000,000 bushels of grain in 1872 ; and in 1873 the receipts and exports 
were largely increased over this figure. She contributed $2,500,000 in duties 
from her custom-house in 1872; manufactured in 1873, 1,384, 180 barrels of flour, 



232 PHASES OF THE RIVER TRADE. 

and received nearly that number by various rail and river routes; received 
279,678 cattle, and shipped 188,306; imported and exported more than 1,000,000 
swine ; took nearly 30,000 bales of hemp into market ; handled hundreds of 
millions of feet of lumber, shingles and laths drifted down from the Upper 
Mississippi, the Black and the Wisconsin rivers ; and consummated vast bargains 
in wool, hides and tobacco. 

The river trade has many peculiar features, and is subject to a thousand 
fluctuations and adversities which make it, at all times, hazardous. For many 
years past the steamboat men have had unprofitable seasons to bewail. Their 
especial enemies have been low water and railroad competition. The railways 
may in future gradually absorb the carrying trade of the Mississippi valley ; but 
such is not at present the case. The rivers have thus far remained the principal 
arteries of commerce ; and the moment that low water is reached, or ice closes 
navigation, the greatest depression is visible in St. Louis ; trade is at an absolute 
stand-still. 

The Mississippi is the main outlet possessed by the city for her supplies for 
southern consumers. In view of this fact, it is of the greatest importance that 
the river should receive the improvements so much needed between the mouths 
of the Missouri and the Ohio. A formidable system of dykes and dams, it is 
confidently believed, would make open navigation feasible throughout the year. 

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the picturesqueness and vivacity 
of the river trade ; it must be seen. One appreciates the real volume of the 
current of the " Father of Waters" only after he learns something of the multi- 
tude of boats, barges and rafts on its ample breast. Every conceivable variety 
of river-boat grates its keel against the St. Lou'is levee : the floating palace, the 
"Great Republic;" the "Natchez," or the "Robert E. Lee;" the strong, flat- 
bottomed Red river packet ; the cruisers of the Upper Mississippi and of the 
turbid Missouri ; the barges, in long procession, laden with coal and iron and 
lead and copper ore ; the huge arks of the Transportation Company, each 
capable of receiving 100,000 bushels of grain within its capacious bosom ; while 
rafts of every size and shape are scattered along the giant stream like chips and 
straws on a mountain brook. 

Nearly 3,000 steamboat arrivals are annually registered at the port of St. 
Louis. Drifting down on the logs come a rude and hardy class of men, who 
chafe under city restraint, requiring, now and then, stern management. Some- 
times one of these figures, suddenly arriving from the ancient forests on the 
rivers above, creates a sensation by striding through a fashionable street, his long 
hair falling about his wrinkled and weather-beaten face, and his trusty rifle slung 
at his shoulder. 

The steamboat men on these upper waters of the Mississippi suffer when the 
"ice gorges" come. Faces become dark with anxiety or black with fear at the 
news of each fresh disaster. Even the dreaded " low water," with all the 
dangers of "snags" and sunken wrecks, is not so much to be feared as one of 
the great ice sweeps which, with its glittering teeth, will in a few moments grind 
to atoms hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property. 



DISASTERS ON THE MISSISSIPPI. 



233 




In December the Mississippi, at St. 
Louis, is sometimes closed by ice, and 
before the great bridge was built, 
hundreds of teams crossed upon the 
natural bridge to and from the Illinois 
shore. The breaking up is sudden — 
dozens of boats and cargoes being 
swept away and annihilated. Then 
come the stories of romantic and hair- 
breadth escapes ; the population along 
the banks becoming wild with excite- 
ment over the pending fate of some 
unfortunate family swept out into the 
ice-filled current. Steamboat owners 
even hardly dare look in a newspaper. 

In 1872 there were over five hund- 
red and fifty disasters on the Missis- 
sippi river and her tributaries — by 
few of which, however, was there any 
loss of life, although the annual des- 
truction of property is enormous, oc- 
curring in almost every conceivable 
manner. But the record of these 
disasters is not without its grim humor. 
One can hardly repress a smile at the 
announcement, in the terse, expressive 
language of the river, that " Phil. 
Sheridan broke loose at St. Louis," or 
that " Hyena broke her engine," " Lake 
Erie ran through herself," "Mud Hen 
blew up at Bellevue," " Enterprise 
broke a wrist at Cairo," "Andy John- 
son blew out a joint near Alton," 
" Wild Cat sunk a barge at Rising 
Sun," " Humming Bird smashed a 
shaft," "St. Francis broke her doctor," 
" Daniel Boone was crowded on shore 
by ice," or "John Kilgour, trying to 
land at Evansville, broke nine arms." 
The river-men have not been sat- 
isfied to confer upon their beloved 
craft the names of heroes and saints. 
They rake up all fantastic cognomens 
which the romance of the centuries or 
the slang of the period can afford, be- 



234 



RIVER BARGEMEN CAPTAIN, EADS. 



stowing them upon clumsy and beautiful crafts alike, while they pay but little 
regard to incongruities of gender or class : the "Naiad" may be a coal -barge, 
or the "Dry Docks" a palace steamer. The ice makes short work of even the 
largest cargoes ; the river will swallow up several hundred thousand bushels 
of coal or grain as if it were the merest bagatelle, while the gorges gape for more. 
Great numbers of barges ply between St. Louis and Pittsburg, via the Ohio, 
engaged in the transportation of iron ore. It is a long and wild journey, moving 
slowly upon the treacherous currents of the two great streams, the men on the 
barges sometimes contenting themselves for a month without going on shore, 
living on rude fare, and cuddling with their families in little cabins in the boats' 




View of the Caisson of the East Abutment of the St Louis Bridge, as it appealed during construction. 

sides, like the Belgian canal-men. Dozens of these barges are always moored at 
Carondelet, waiting the freights which pour into them from the mines in the 
south-east of the State. When navigation throughout the Mississippi valley 
shall have been properly improved, the river trade of St. Louis will be quadrupled. 
The triumph in engineering, won by Captain Eads in the successful comple- 
tion of the great bridge, is a magnificent one. This was not, however, the first 
important work accomplished by him. He built the vessels " Benton," " Baron 
de Kalb," " Cincinnati," and others, used with such effect by Admiral Porter 
during- the war. He afterward constructed fourteen iron clads for the United 



BRIDGING THE FATHER OF WATERS, 



235 



States, and he invented various improvements in military and naval defences. 
He was the first man in America or Europe to devise successful means for 
operating heavy ordnance by steam. He knows the Mississippi as well as any 
one can know that most capricious and uncertain of streams, and was, of all men, 
best qualified for the work of bridging the current. 

It was evident from the first that the Father of Waters would not consent to 
be bridged without a struggle. The main obstacles to the construction were, of 
course, the width, the depth, and the shifting sands of the river. It was neces- 
sary to take into account the certainty of an enormous increase of transportation, 
and to obstruct navigation as little as possible. The foundations must be planted 
on the rock-bed below the fickle and dangerous sands. 

Two companies for building the bridge were at first organized, one chartered 
by the Missouri Legislature, the other by that of Illinois. The company char- 
tered in Missouri was naturally somewhat jealous of the other, fearing lest 
Chicago might play some game against the interests of St. Louis, and quite a 
contest ensued until, in the spring of 1868, a consolidation was effected, and the 




The building of the East Pier of the St. Louis Bridge. 

work was placed under the direction of Captain Eads as chief engineer. The 
new corporation, which has been ably officered, assumed the title of the Illinois 
and St. Louis Bridge Company. The original estimate of the cost of the struc- 



236 THE NEW BRIDGE AT ST. LOUIS. 

ture was $5,000,000; but the whole cost will probably reach $10,000,000, two- 
thirds of which sum have been supplied by J. T. Morgan & Co., American 
bankers in London. 

The greatest difficulties in the work were encountered in the sinking of the 
piers. Captain Eads decided to construct them of solid masonry, and to sink 
them by means of pneumatic caissons, many of the features of which had been 
designed by him expressly to meet the exigencies of the case. The caisson for 
the first pier was made of heavy wrought iron, weighed 500,000 pounds, and was 
82 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 18 feet high. It had seven air-chambers, with 
thirteen girders, and nearly 200 workmen were employed on it for four months 
in reaching to the rock-bed in the stream. This was effected at a depth of 93 
feet and four inches below the surface of the water, in March, 1870. In Novem- 
ber of 1870, the launch of the caisson to be used in laying the eastern abutment 
pier was made the occasion of quite a public celebration. That pier now rests on 
the rock at a depth of 130 feet below high water mark. The work in the air- 
chambers during the building of these piers was difficult and dangerous, and from 
time to time the river, as if angry at the intrusion, required a sacrifice of human life. 
Sometimes in winter the work was interrupted by the vast masses of ice hurled 
against the bridge-works ; now and then the sand outside the caissons was scoured 
away, causing the sand inside (put there to equalize the pressure) to burst the 
walls ; and at the banks great trouble was experienced in setting the coffer dams. 

But all obstacles were finally overcome, and in June of 1874, trains began 
crossing the Mississippi on the new bridge. It now stretches from the foot of 
Washington avenue in St. Louis to a corresponding point on the Illinois shore, 
at an elevation of fifty feet above high water. 

Its extraordinary breadth of span and depth of foundation are its chief merits. 
In the western abutment there are 2,500 tons of stone, and in the eastern abut- 
ment pier 45,000. The bridge has three spans, each formed with four ribbed 
arches made of cast-steel. The centre span is 520 feet, and the side ones are 
each 500 feet in the clear. The four arches forming each of these spans consist 
each of an upper and lower curved rib, extending from pier to pier, and between 
these ribs there is a horizontal system of bracing for the purpose of securing the 
arches in their relative distances from each other. Two centre arches of each 
span are thirteen feet nine and a-half inches apart from centre to centre, and the 
upper member of one arch is secured to the lower one of the other by a system 
of diagonal bracing. The roadways are formed by transverse iron beams twelve 
inches in depth, suitably separated. 

The bridge accommodates two double steam railway tracks, and one for 
street railways, besides footwalks and a carriage-way. It is estimated that the 
annual saving to St. Louis by the facilities for transportation accorded by the 
bridge will amount to a million of dollars. 

In the mere item of coal, which is carried to St. Louis from the Illinois side, 
hundreds of thousands of dollars will be saved yearly. A fine union depot will 
soon be erected at the end of the tunnel through which trains will enter and leave 
St. Louis via the bridge. 



XXIV. 



THE MINERAL WEALTH OF MISSOURI. 



LET us peer into that busy suburban ward of St. Louis which still clings so 
fondly to its old French name of " Carondelet." The drive thither from 
the city carries you past the arsenal, where Government now and then has a 
few troops, and past many a pretty mansion, into the dusty street of a prosaic 
manufacturing town, near the bank of the Mississippi. 

Descending toward the water-side from the street you find every available 
space crowded with mammoth iron and zinc-furnaces, in whose immense struc- 
tures of iron, wood, and glass, half-naked men, their bodies smeared with 
perspiration and coal dust, are wheeling about blazing masses of metal, or guid- 




In the "Cut" at Iron Mountain, Missouri. [Page 241.] 

ing the pliant iron bars through rollers and moulds, or cooling their heated faces 
and arms in buckets of water brought up fresh from the stream. Here, in a zinc- 
furnace, half-a-dozen Irishmen wrestle with the long puddling rods which they 



2 3 8 



THE VULCAN IRON WORKS AT CARONDELET. 



thrust into the seventy- times-seven heated furnaces; the green and yellowish 
flames from the metal are reflected on their pale and withered features, and give 
them an almost unearthly expression. 

Farther on, the masons are toiling at the brick-work of a new blast-furnace, 
which already rears its tall towers a hundred feet above the Mississippi shore; 
not far thence you may see the flaming chimney of the quaint old Carondelet 
furnace — the first built in all that section; or may linger for hours in such 
immense establishments as the South St. Louis or Vulcan iron works, fancying 
them the growth of half a century of patient upbuilding, until you are told that 
nearly every establishment has been created since the war. 




At the Vulcan Iron Works — Carondelet. 



The Vulcan Iron Works, which now employs twelve hundred men in its blast- 
furnaces and rolling-mills, overspreads seventeen acres, boasts $600,000 worth of 
machinery, and has two furnaces smelting 25,000 tons of ore annually, while its 
rolling-mill can turn out 45,000 tons of rail in a year, was not in existence in 
1 870 ; indeed, there was not a brick laid on the premises. There is nothing else 
so wonderful as this in the South or South-west; Kansas City, in the north- 
western part of the State, is the only other place in Missouri which can show 
similar material progress. 

The little Riviere des Peres, where the holy Catholic fathers once had a mis- 
sion among the Osage Indians, empties into the Mississippi, close beside the 
Vulcan iron works ; its banks are piled high with coal and refuse. The fathers 
would know it no more. They would stare aghast at the thousand horse-power 
pump ; at the myriads of fiery snakes crawling about on the floors of the rolling- 
mill ; at the troops of Irish laborers, the cautious groups about the doors of 
the sputtering blast-furnace, and the molten streams pouring into the sand-beds 
to form into "pigs" of iron; and could hardly credit the statement that Caron- 
delet furnaces alone can manufacture 140,000 tons of iron yearly., 



THE ENGLAND OF TO-MORROW. 239 

This sudden and marked progress at Carondelet is significant. Such amazing 
growth is indicative of a splendid future. The elder England is fading out ; her 
iron-fields are exhausted ; and her producers growl because American iron- 
masters can at last undersell those of England. The heart of the republic, the 
great commonwealth of Missouri, is to be the England of to-morrow. 

Her mineral stores are inexhaustible. There are a thousand railroads locked 
up in the great coffers of the Iron Mountain. A thousand iron ships lie dormant 
in the ore-pockets scattered along the line of the Atlantic and Pacific railway, 
and a million fortunes await the men who shall come and take them. Missouri 
is one of the future great foundries of the world ; the coal-fields of Indiana and 
Illinois are near at hand ; the earth is stored with hematites ; the hills are seamed 
with speculars. The work has already begun in earnest. 

Enough good iron can be produced from Missouri ores and Illinois coal to 
supply the wants of the United States henceforth ; and at the rate at which 
furnaces are at present multiplying throughout the State, this consummation will 
be reached. All the conditions for a favorable competition with England have 
at last been arrived at, for the cost of labor in Missouri furnaces to-day is but a 
trifle more than it is in the cheapest furnaces in Wales. The four or five millions 
which St. Louis now has invested in the manufacture of pig-iron will, in a few 
years, become forty or fifty; and the furnaces in South-eastern Missouri, aided by 
those in Pennsylvania supplied with ore from the same source, will girdle the 
world with their products. The aggregate production of pig-iron in Missouri 
in 1870 was 54,000 tons; in 1880 it will be ten times that amount, for the 
capacity of Carondelet alone in 1873 was "nearly three times as much as that of 
the whole State three years ago.* If St. Louis, unaided by any special interest, 
could increase the value of her manufactured products from $27,000,000 in 
i860 to more than $100,000,000 in 1870, what may she not be expected to 
accomplish, with the Iron Mountain at her back, in the decade at whose very 
beginning she has demonstrated such wonderful capacity for progress ? 

How long, before, with proper investment of capital, St. Louis may be the 
centre of a region producing as many millions of tons of pig-iron annually as 
are now produced in England ? Continuing as she has begun, less than twenty 
years will place her at that pinnacle of commercial glory. 

I will not follow the ingenious individuals who have lightened the ennui of 
their leisure by computing, upon a highly speculative basis, the exact number of 
tons of ore contained in the famous Iron Mountain. But there is no doubt 
that the term inexhaustible can with justice be applied to its stores. 

Certain acute English witnesses have recently, after a careful survey, declared 
that the coal and iron deposits of Alabama are now the most deeply interesting 
material facts on the American continent. Whether or not this statement is at 
all influenced by the knowledge that numerous investments in Alabama's iron- 
fields have been made by Englishmen, or by ignorance of the quantity and 

* The coal used at Carondelet comes from the Illinois side of the Mississippi, and a new 
bridge across the stream at that point is contemplated, that the high prices charged during the 
icy season may be avoided. 

16 



24O THE IRON REGION OF MISSOURI. 

quality of the ore in Missouri, I do not know; but the latter State may cer- 
tainly claim an equal share in the interest which her sister of the South has 
awakened, so far as the value of her deposits is concerned. If it can be said that 
the hematites of Alabama, which yield fifty-six per cent, of pure iron, will 
compare favorably with the best ores of Cumberland and the North of Spain, 
what shall we say of the ores of Missouri, which in many cases boast a proven 
yield of sixty-six per cent. ? 

The main iron region of Missouri is situated in the south-east and southern 
portions of the State, and the greater portion of it is adjacent and directly tribu- 
tary to St. Louis. The hundreds of thousands of tons of ore annually sent out of 
the State to be smelted all pass through or near the great city. 

My visit to the Iron Mountain had been resolved upon before I entered Mis- 
souri ; but my wildest ideas of its importance were none too exaggerated for the 
reality. The "mountain" is situated eighty-one miles south-west of St. Louis, 
on the Arkansas branch of the Iron Mountain railroad. The route thither in 
summer-time is charming. The railroad runs so near to the banks of the Missis- 
sippi (there high and rugged), that nervous people, not fascinated by the grand 
outlook over the current, may confess to a tremor now and then. 

But the exquisite shapes of the foliage on the one bank, and the great 
expanse of the "bottoms" on the other, made a pleasing picture, to which the 
dazzling sheen of the broad sheet of smoothly-flowing water, bearing lightly 
forward the white steamers and the dark, flat barges, lent a strange charm. 
From Bismarck, a pretty little station among pleasant fields, it was but a brief 
ride to -Iron Mountain station, the town which has grown up out of the mining 
interests managed and owned in these latter years by Chouteau, Harrison, and 
Valle. Three of the wealthiest families in Missouri are represented in the owner- 
ship of this and the adjacent region, and each has been much interested in the 
material development of the State. 

The " mountain," which rises rather abruptly from a beautiful valley, land- 
locked and filled with delicious fields, was originally rather more than 200 feet 
high, and its base covers an area of 500 acres. All the country round about is 
still crowded with reminiscences of Spanish domination. The names of some of 
the counties and towns are French and Spanish souvenirs ; and the " King's 
Highway," running through St. Franfois county, is still often called by its 
original name. 

The people in the vicinity are quiet and usually well-to-do farmer folk, and 
look upon the mountain as the most wonderful of natural phenomena. The 
French and Spaniards seem never to have suspected the rich nature of the 
■queerly-shaped elevation and its surroundings ; for the original possessor, Joseph 
Pratte, who obtained it by a grant from Zenon Trudeau, the Spanish governor, 
in September of 1797, mentions in his petition for a grant that the land is sterile, 
and only fit for grazing. 

Pratte's grant composed some 20,000 arpents, or 17,000 English acres, and 
from his hands it became the property of Van Doren, Pease & Co., who, in 1837, 
were recognized as the Iron Mountain Company. Congress had meantime con- 



IRON MOUNTAIN MISSOURI. 



241 



finned the Spanish grants. In 1843 the American Iron Mountain Company 
took the place of the above-mentioned firm. August Belmont, of New York, 
was among the subscribers to the capital stock, which was $273,000 ; and James 
Harrison, of St. Louis, one of the most energetic iron workers of the West, was 
its first president. 

For many years the investments of the original companies did not pay, and 
the investors were sneered at as guilty of an act of folly. 

In those days the Iron Mountain railroad was not, and all the ore dug out 
was hauled painfully forty-five miles in carts to the ancient town of St. Gene- 
vieve. But when pig-iron became worth $85 per ton, there was no lack of 
energy in examining the real resources of the mountain, and since 1862 the 
company has taken millions of tons of ore from the surface and from the deep 
incisions made in the hill- sides. 

The ores there, as throughout the section, are mainly rich specular oxides, 
and were originally pronounced too rich to work. Even to this day the surface 
specimens are plenteous, and one could readily pick up a cart-load of lumps all 
ready for the furnace. In the deep cuts and along the mountain sides more than 
1,000 men were at work at the time of my visit, Irishmen, Swedes and Germans 
predominating. 




The Furnace — Iron Mountain, Missouri. [Page 242.] 

The mountain is composed almost exclusively of iron in its purest form, and 
the regiment of laborers mine ore enough to load 125 cars, carrying 10 tons each, 
daily, besides supplying two furnaces of large capacity, established at the base of 
the mountain. A century of hammering at the hill's sides will not bring it level 
with the valley. The surface ore is so intermingled even with the earth, that I 



242 MR. EDWIN HARRISON — PILOT KNOB — IRON COUNTY. 

found a number of stout Swedes washing it very much as gold is washed for, and 
extracting tons which, in more careless days, had been thrown away. 

Iron Mountain is a typical Missouri mining town. It was mainly built up by 
Hon. John G. Scott, of St. Louis, an ex- Congressman, and largely identified 
with all the iron interests of that section. Mr. Edwin Harrison, the present 
president, and one of the principal owners, is an accomplished metallurgist, one 
of the most active business men in the South-west, and interested in a dozen 
large and successful enterprises connected with the development of metal. Both 
at Iron Mountain and at Irondale, as well as at other mining towns which I 
visited, the workmen have built handsome cottages, and liquor and the other 
debasing influences sometimes found at mines are beyond their reach. 

There was a subtle charm about the roar and ominous hum of the great fur- 
naces after dark, when the clink of the hammers and the noise of the blasting 
on the mountain had ceased, and darkness had shrouded the little valley. The 
chimneys of the " blasts" glowed like dragons' eyes ; the semi-nude figures flitting 
in the huge open sheds, before the doors of the furnaces, looked like demons. 

When the masses of broken and carefully-selected ore, together with the 
requisite charcoal and limestone, had been transfused in the fearful heat, and the 
blast was ready to be drawn off, the workmen gathered half timorously about 
the aperture whence the molten iron was to flow, and gave it vent. Then first 
sprang out a white current — the slag — looking like gypsum, and hardening as it 
touched the sand. Finally came the deep fiery glow of the iron itself, as it 
flowed resistlessly down the channels cut in the sand to receive it, hissing fiercely 
from time to time, and lighting up the great stone vault of the furnace with an 
unearthly glare, then " dying into sullen darkness," and forming the cold, hard, 
homely bars which are one day rolled into the rails by means of which we anni- 
hilate distance, and build cities like St. Louis. 

The whole region round about is rich in mines and minerals. A few miles 
below Iron Mountain rises Pilot Knob, a stately peak towering far above the 
lovely Ozark range which surrounds it in every direction ; and from the por- 
phyry there and on Shepherd Mountain great quantities of ore are extracted. 
It is the boast of the people of the section that Iron county, in which lie Shep- 
herd, Arcadia and Bogy mountains and the Knob, contains more iron than any 
other equal area known on the globe. 

From this valley more than 100,000 tons of iron have been shipped since the 
formation of the Pilot Knob Iron Company. The works there and elsewhere 
in this section were much injured, and some of them w r ere burned, during the 
war, by Price's raiders. - The silicious and magnetic and specular oxides found in 
the Pilot Knob and Shepherd Mountain region are abundant and pure. The 
specular oxides abound in Dent, Crawford, Phillips and Pulaski counties. The 
beds of bog ore extend for miles among the swamps and cypresses in South- 
eastern Missouri; and hematite ores are found in almost every county in the 
south of the State. Throughout the coal-measures of the commonwealth there 
are vast beds of spathic ore, which will serve when the more available deposits 
have been exhausted. 



THE MISSOURI COAL FIELD LEAD MINES. 



243 




The Summit of Pilot Knob — Iron County, Missouri. [Page 24 



And this is not all. For miles and miles along the Missouri river, iron crops 
out from the bold and picturesque bluffs, and it is estimated that it can be easily 
mined and placed in barges for less than a dollar per ton. On the line of the 
Atlantic and Pacific railroad also, vast deposits of the blue specular variety are 
gradually being un- 
earthed. At Scotia, at 
Sullivan, at Jamestown, 
at Salem, the treasures 
of iron are astonishing. 

Missouri should take 
care to keep the furnaces 
for smelting these ores 
within her borders, for 
pig-iron and Bessemer 
steel can to-day be made 
cheaper there, at the 
present prices of labor 
and coal, than in Penn- 
sylvania. If America 
desires or intends one day 
to supply Europe with 
the ore which she is beginning to clamor for, the policy of transporting the 
ores from these fresh fields to the furnaces in the Quaker State seems neither 
wise nor economical. The stores of, coal match those of iron ; it was long ago 
estimated that Missouri had an area of 26,000 square miles of coal-beds between 
the mouth of the Des Moines river and the Indian Territory ; and along all the 
railroads in Northern Missouri, and beside the Missouri Pacific, coal-veins have 
proved very extensive. 

The development of the lead mines of Missouri is full of romance. De Soto, 
disdaining any thing save gold, carelessly passed them by. One hundred and 
fifty years ago Renault and La Motte hunted in the Ozark hills for the precious 
metal, but only found lead, and to-day La Motte's mine is still called by his 
name. As early as 18 19 the annual yield of the lead mines in the State was 
3,000,000 of pounds; in 1870 the annual production amounted to nearly 
14,000,000; and in 1872 it had risen to over 20,000,000. 

The revival of the lead mining interest, in 1872, created almost as much 
excitement in certain sections as if gold had been in question. The largest 
investments were made in South-western and Central Missouri ; old mines were 
reopened, new machinery was hurried in, and in Jasper county, a wild section 
on the borders of Kansas and the Indian Territory, a new town sprang up as by 
magic in the midst of a section where lead lay near the surface. There was 
genuine California enthusiasm ; furnaces, stores, shops, hotels and churches 
arose on Joplin creek, and the town of "Joplin" was born. An impulse was 
given to the lead production of Missouri, which will not decline until the imports 
of lead from Europe to this country have been vastly reduced. 



244 



MINERAL INTERESTS TRIBUTARY TO ST. LOUIS. 



The area of the lead region comprises nearly 7,000 square miles. In the 
neighborhood of jasper and Newton counties are large stores of zinc ores, sup- 
posed to extend into the Indian Territory. In the counties of St. Francois and 
Madison there is a fine vein of lead, of great length, " running at large" through 
limestone strata. Upon this vein are the splendid properties of the Mine La 
Motte Company. Most of the lead in that vicinity, and in Franklin, Wash- 
ington, Jefferson, Crawford, Phelps, Dent, and other counties, carries cobalt and 
nickel in abundance, and not far away, brown hematite iron ores are found in 
profusion. The extension of the Iron Mountain and the Atlantic and Pacific 
railroads through the mineral regions has done more for the future development 
of the State than all other efforts put together. 

In a few years both roads will be lined with furnaces and mines of all descrip- 
tions, and will extend branches in every direction. Several varieties of copper 
are found in the State, and the mines in Shannon, Madison, and Franklin coun- 
ties have been worked successfully. New discoveries of zinc ore are daily made 
in all sections ; cobalt, nickel, manganese, tin, and marble are also found. The 
Ozark marbles of Missouri are already famous; they aid in the adornment of the 
national capital. Excellent building limestones, coarse, reddish granite and 
various shades of sandstones, are to be found in all quarters. 

But the iron and coal interests tributary to St. Louis dominate all others, and 
give the finest promise. It is evident that Missouri is about to enter as a for- 
midable competitor upon one of the greatest industrial fields in the world. She 
has cheap food in a strong new country, rapidly receiving immigration. She has 
ores of surpassing richness lying close to the surface. She has coal in vast areas, 
easily mined— coal, too, which does not require coking before it aids in the 
smelting of iron ore. She has an economical system of inter-communication by 
river and rail, backed, we may hope and predict, by plenty of money in the 
strong boxes of the fathers of St. Louis. The time is coming when that capital, 

which has so long lain dormant, will 
be awakened, and turned into the ser- 
vice of the industry that in less than 
a generation is to make St. Louis a 
city with a million inhabitants. 

Here we are again at Carondelet 
— passing the long ore-trains hourly 
arriving from the Iron Mountain. 
What crowding, what noise and clang 
of machinery, what smoke and stench 
of coal ! The workmen, with thick 
leather aprons about their waists, and 
gloves on their hands, are bringing 
the bars of pig-iron from the blast- 
furnaces, and cording them up by 
hundreds. Here is a crowd of per- 
The "Tracks-— Pilot Knob, Missouri. [Page 242.] turbed Irish laborers, shrieking and 




AN UNFORTUNATE WORKMAN. 



245 



dancing around a prostrate man, whose limbs have been scarred and seared 
by a sudden spurt of hot iron from the furnace. His comrades are bending 
over him, eagerly cutting away his garments with their knives, while the iron 
burns its way into his flesh. 




MAP OF MISSOURI. 



XXV. 



TRADE IN ST. LOUIS — THE PRESS — KANSAS CITY — ALONG 
THE MISSISSIPPI — THE CAPITAL. 

FROM Carondelet we may return cityward by another route, climbing the hill 
which leads to Grand avenue, and wandering up a country road to a vine- 
yard, and a "garden- close" among beautiful shrubbery. The hills around are 
covered with vineyards, or rich fields of corn and other cereals. Returning to 
Grand avenue, you may drive through the new "Tower Grove " park, with its 




View in Shaw's Garden — St Louis. 



pretty arbors, rustic houses, and clumps of trees ; past Lafayette park, much like 
one of the great squares in the West End of London, and, rattling through street 
after street, lined with elegant houses, descend at last toward the banks of the 
river and the business section of the town. 

Although the suburbs of St. Louis are not remarkable, there are many 
attractive parks and parklets near at hand. The superb botanical garden known 
as "Shaw's," adjoining the "Tower Grove" park, is the especial pride of Mis- 
souri. The Forest park, containing fourteen hundred acres, clothed in delicious 
foliage, dotted with elms, oak, ash and sycamores, festooned with grape-vines, 



THE FAIR-GROUND PROMENADES IN AND AROUND ST. LOUIS. 247 



and watered by the capricious little Riviere des Peres, is not as yet improved, but 
will doubtless be the principal recreation ground of the city in time. Lindell, 
Belmont, and the Park of Fruits, are all beautiful ; and the park upon which the 
famous St. Louis fair is annually held has many lovely winding walks, garden- 
spots, and knots of shrubbery. 

To this fair- ground every October many thousands of visitors flock from 
the whole Mississippi valley ; and the vast amphitheatre, which will seat 
twenty -five thousand people, is daily crowded by a constantly changing 
audience. St. Louis worships annually one day at the shrine of this fair, 
which is mechanical as well as agricultural in its scope. All business is 
suspended ; schools are closed, and a species of high carnival is inaugurated. 
Inside the amphitheatre there is a huge procession of horses, cattle, sheep, 
and swine, at which the good burghers look on something after the fashion 
of ancient Romans at the Coliseum. 

The stranger will do well to wander the whole city over — dine at Porcher's, 
and loiter in the pleasant parlors of the "University Club;" to attend the 
concerts at Uhrig's, and the mass in the old cathedral ; inspect the plafonds and 
other gorgeous splendors of the palace in which the St. Louis Life Insurance 
Company transacts its business ; see 
Benton on his pedestal in Lafayette 
park ; and visit the burial grounds of 
beautiful Bellefontaine. He may dive 
into the great vaults of the Imperial 
Wine Company, where a million bottles 
of native champagne lie always cooling; 
or do reverence to the Water Works, 
where two powerful engines each force 
the Mississippi river to contribute 
seventeen million gallons daily to supply 
the wants of the city; or have a peep 
at the prisons of the " Four Courts," 
and even be a looker-on at the matinee, 
locally known as "The Terrible Court," 
where a police judge dispenses justice, 
sends vagrants to the workhouse for a 
thousand days, and suspicious charac- 
ters across the river in twenty minutes. 
Or he may explore the score of mam- 
moth foundries, where iron is manu- 
factured in every form, from gas-piping 

to architectural WOrk for houses ; Or Statue to Thomas H. Benton, in Lafayette Park. 

gaze at the dome of the imposing Court- House, — a kind of miniature "St. 
Paul's," — or climb the hill at the city's back, on which the ungainly Lunatic 
Asylum stands. Or he may visit the First Presbyterian and Christ churches; 
or inspect the Gratiot street prison, where many sympathizers with the 




248 



THE PRESS OF ST. LOUIS. 




cause of the South were confined during the late war. But after all this, he 
may look about and be surprised to find that a city of four hundred and fifty 
thousand inhabitants cannot boast a first-class theatre/* and is compelled to 

have its opera season in 
a second-rate variety hall. 
If one insists on being 
amused, however, he can 
read the editorial' columns 
of the leading newspapers, 
and note the playful ani- 
mosity which evidently 
guides the editorial pens, 
getting a lesson or two, 
meanwhile, in journalism ; 
for St. Louis is as rich in 
journals as it is poor in 
theatres, — The Democrat, 
The Republican, The Globe, 

The "Four Courts" Building -St. Louis. [Page 247.] anc J TJieTimeS all showing 

admirably equipped establishments. The Republican building is one of the 
most elegant and complete newspaper offices in the world ; there is but 
one in the country which equals it, and that is in New York. The Democrat 
is a Republican journal, and The Re- 
publican is Democratic. j ^ 

The first number of The Republican 
was issued in 1808, as The Gazette, 
printed on a rude press of Western man- 
ufacture. It has twice arisen, an untiring 
phoenix, from the ruins of great fires. 
Mr. Knapp, its editor, was always an 
opponent of secession, although strictly 
his paper might now be classed as an 
opposition sheet. The Democrat was an 
early advocate of free soil principles, 
and a stout defender of the new Repub- 
lican party in the troublesome times 
following the election of Buchanan. It 
is now ably managed by George W. 
Fishback, one of the leading journalists 
of the West. The Globe grew out of 
a division of interests in The Democrat; The Gratiot Street Pris0!1 - St - Louis - l Pa s e 247 -' 

both it and The Times have grown up handsomely. The DispatcJi and The 
Journal are evening papers, respectively Democratic and Republican. The 




There are several theatrical buildings, but there is no regularly organized theatre. 



THE INCREASE OF TRADE. 



249 



religious and literary press of the city numbers several able periodicals, among 
which is The Southern Review, a quarterly of national reputation. 

The higher intellectual life in St. Louis is not apparently so vigorous as that 
of many of the Eastern cities. The nature of its population prevents a large and 
symmetrical growth at present in that direction. A great portion of that popula- 
tion is either foreign born, or in the transition from the old to the new nationality; 
and the material growth of the city and the neighboring country is so " fierce 
and vast " * that people have little time for abstractions, or for the graces and 
culture which come with literature and art. There are one or two promising 
artists, and Mr. Diehl and Mr. Pattison have done some good work. 

It has been said that no course of lectures has ever paid in St. Louis ; this 
seems astonishing, if, indeed, it be the fact. The libraries are numerous and 
good. The Mercantile is the largest, and its spacious rooms are adorned with 
statues by Miss Hosmer, and other 
sculptors of note. 

Of course the city boasts many 
splendid interiors and almost princely 
establishments. It could hardly fail 
to produce them, with a dry-goods 
trade which, in 1872, aggregated 
fifty millions of dollars, and is steadily 
increasing at the rate of thirty per. 
cent, yearly. Before the war the dry- 
goods business engaged but from ten 
to twelve millions. The retail trade 
of one dry-goods establishment in 
St. Louis now amounts to more 
than six million dollars annually, and 
there are two which boast a million, 
and four half- a -million each. . The 
trade in groceries spreads over an 
immense section, there being in this business three firms whose transactions 
amount to two millions each annually, and no less than seven which claim 
a million each. 

The sales of sugar by one of the principal sugar refinery companies amounted 
to 32,000,000 pounds in 1872, and yielded the Government nearly $1,000,000 of 
revenue. The wholesale trade in hardware counts up several millions, and in 1871 
seven wholesale firms reported sales varying from $600,000 to $150,000. More 
than one hundred million feet of lumber are usually on hand in the St. Louis 
markets. From five to seven million dollars are invested in leather manufac- 
tures, and the annual sales exceed fifteen millions. Three - fourths of all the 
sheetings sold in St. Louis are now manufactured in cotton mills in the Missis- 
sippi valley, and St. Louis herself has considerable capital invested in the manu- 
facture of textile fabrics for her own market. 

* See General Walker's preface to last Census Report. 




First Presbyterian Church — St. Louis. 



[Page 247.] 



250 



GAIN SINCE THE WAR SOCIAL LEGISLATION. 







Christ Church — St. Louis. [Page 247.] 



The gain which the city has made since the war is shown by the statement that 
in i860 the capital invested in manufactures there was about $13,000,000, while 
it is now more than $60,000,000. Fine churches, hospitals, and many worthy 
charities show that much of the profit from these immense businesses is properly 

employed.* In the local and muni- 
cipal politics there are but few excite- 
ments. The Germans are not so 
readily welcomed in official positions 
as they once were, because a pretty 
liberal exercise of power had revived 
their feeling of nationality rather too 
strongly, and they were making 
German blood an overweening quali- 
fication for office. 

The true valuation of the property 
within the limits of St. Louis city is 
$475,000,000. The bonded debt of 
the metropolis is a little over 
$14,000,000; the floating debt is 
$543,669 ; the amount of cash and 
assets now in the sinking fund, 
$805,744. It is impossible in the limits of a work of this description to 
give an exact statement of the amount of trade, and increase in wealth and 
manufactures. I have endeavored merely to show how vigorous and substantial 
that increase has been. New industries are constantly locating at St. Louis, or in 
its immediate vicinity ; and a persistence is shown in their establishment which 
augurs grand results. The history of glass manufacture there has been one of 
disaster for many years ; it is said that a million dollars has been sunk in unsuc- 
cessful efforts to establish it, but at last St. Louis has the credit of an establish- 
ment which can produce plate-glass, said to be equal to the best of European 
manufacture. 

St. Louis is, I believe, the only city in the United States which ever adopted the 
Continental method of licensing the social evil, and there has been a great battle 
recently fought over it, in which church, society, and the Legislature took active 
part Mayor Brown, progressive and liberal in municipal matters, sided with the 
license system, maintaining that it was the only means to the much desired 
end — reform and control of the fallen. The money received from license fees 
was devoted purely to the furthering of reformatory measures. The Legislature 
was induced to consider the matter seriously, and St. Louis was finally compelled 
to relinquish a system which has been so much debated. Missouri maintains a 
State lottery, and that too has been somewhat discussed. It is honestly admin- 
istered, but seems poor business for a State to lend its sanction to. 

* These figures only serve to show the condition of trade in St. Louis in 1873-74; the growth 
and increase is so rapid that it is almost impossible to collect statistics one month which will be 
correct the next. 



KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI. 25 I 

The Missouri river, flowing from west to east through the commonwealth, 
divides the State into northern and southern portions, the rich agricultural lands 
of which Missourians are so proud lying mainly north of the muddy, lazy stream. 
Where the river first touches the Kansas line there is, as has been already 
intimated, another instance of marvelous growth, still more wonderful, perhaps, 
than the progress of St. Louis. 

Kansas City, the young colossus bestriding the bold and irregular bluffs on the 
southern bank of the Missouri just below the mouth of the Kansas, was, in 1850, 
a shabby town, vainly struggling upon the flats by the river side. It had once 
been a station for the wild " bull- whackers," who came to load their' "prairie 
schooners" from the Missouri river boats; and even several years afterward it 
was graceless enough to be thus touchingly characterized by one of the rude 
men of the frontier : " There 's no railroad west of Junction City, no law west of 
Kansas City, and no God west of Hays' City." During the war the forlorn and 
remote town suffered all kinds of evils ; but in 1 865 the Missouri Pacific railroad 
reached it. Then it sprang up ! It is now the terminus of nine splendid railroads, 
which stretch out their long arms over Kansas, Missouri, across the great desert 
to Colorado, give direct connection with Omaha, Chicago and the North, and 
tap Texas and her newly developed fields. 

The city seems to have sprung out of the ground by magic. Upon its scraggy 
bluffs, pierced in all directions by railroad tracks, more than 40,000 people have 
settled, and built miles of elegant streets, lined with fine warehouses, school and 
church edifices. They have bridged the Missouri, erected massive depots and 
stock-yards, fine hotels and many princely residences, and have two of the best 
newspapers in the North-west. They control the market from the Missouri river 
to the Rocky Mountains, have a valuation of $42,000,000, instead of the $1,000, 
000 which they boasted twelve years ago. The jobbing trade of the city alone 
amounts to $17,000,000. The aggregate deposits in the banking institutions in 
1872 reached $72,000,000. Eighty railway trains arrive and depart from the 
crowded depots daily. During the last seven months of 1871, 200,000 cattle 
were received in its stock-yards. More beef is packed there than in any other 
city in the United States. 

In the lower town, which lies down close to the Kansas line (a portion of it, 
indeed, being in Kansas), one sees throngs of drovers and cattle-dealers ; clouds 
of dust arise in the wake of the bellowing and plunging herds in transit ; there is 
a lively stock-market, where hundreds of persons are buzzing about from sunrise 
until sunset; and the railway lines through the streets are so numerous that a 
stranger's life is constantly in danger. Four great packing-houses have facilities 
for dressing 2,000 cattle daily; the spectacle within their vast interiors, where 
hundreds of grimy and bloody butchers dexterously rend the vitals of the 
animals, and convert their flesh into carefully cured and packed provisions, being 
as imposing as it is disagreeable. In 1872 more than 20,000 cattle and 120,000 
swine passed through the hands of Kansas City butchers. 

As the eastern terminus of the great Texan cattle roads of the West alone, 
Kansas City can become one of the largest cities in the West. It is a busy, 



252 PECULIARITIES AND NEEDS OF MISSOURI. 

bustling town, in whose streets the elegantly dressed business man jostles the 
slouching, unkempt farmer from the back-country ; where the hearty currents of 
frontier rudeness meet and mingle with the smoothly- flowing and resistless 
streams of business civilization. Energy is necessary — for, when a new street is 
to be laid out, a bluff has to be leveled ; the town has only been fastened to its 
place by sheer audacity and tremendous pluck. Thousands of Germans and 
Jews have settled in all the region round about. 

The hard riding, hard drinking, blustering Missourian, who carries bowie- 
knife and revolver — the type of those adventurous knights who used to amuse 
themselves by crusading into Kansas, and committing "border-ruffian" outrages, 
is rarely to be seen ; and when one of them finds himself by accident in the roar- 
ing, trafficking town, he feels so uncomfortably out of place that he immediately 
turns his horse's head toward the open country again. Where in i860 there was 
nothing but a desolate moor, now stands a depot through which 1,000,000 people 
annually pass. In twenty years Kansas City will become one of the great 
manufacturing centres of the country. 

The influence and mark of Southern manners have vanished from the north- 
western sections of Missouri. A new type has arisen, and swept out of sight 
those who prevailed " befo' the waw." The same remark may be made of St. 
Louis. Once a thoroughly Southern city in all its attributes, it is now cosmo- 
politan. In the northern and north-western portions of the State there are large 
numbers of New England people ; the tone of society and manners is a curious 
mixture of Colorado and Maine. In some of the counties there is wild life, and 
the enforcement of law is rather difficult ; but such counties are the exceptions. 
The Missouri farmers can never allow a court to try a horse-thief; they always 
give him short shrift. Popular justice is very healthful in many instances, and 
keeps down future rascality. 

Population is the prime need of Missouri. The agricultural resources of the 
State are immense. The river-bottoms along the Missouri are as rich as the 
valley of the Nile. In journeying beside them on the Missouri Pacific railroad 
one sees immense spaces but recently cleared of forests, dotted with log-cabins, 
and barns and their omnipresent appendages, the hog-yards filled with dozens of 
swine ; yellow corn-fields, acres on acres, extending as far as the eye can reach 
among the girdled trees ; men and women cantering to market on bareback 
horses, and grimy children staring from the zig-zag fences. 

The life is like the products of the soil, dusty and coarse ; there is a flavor of 
corn and pork about it, but it is full of vigor. The country north of the Missouri 
river is rich, undulating prairie, watered by abundant streams. The Platte 
country is famous for hemp, grain, and superb stock ; and, indeed, there is no 
section of Missouri which is not well adapted to stock-raising. The climate is so 
mild that there is rarely any necessity of shelter for stock in the winter. The 
State is covered with a network of small streams ; the grasses everywhere are 
rich, and grain crops are unfailing. Countless swine, sheep and cattle now roam 
over the vast swelling prairies ; the swine, I am sorry to say, roaming with equal 
freedom in the streets of most of the towns. Immense tracts of good land south 



THE MISSOURI FORESTS NEW TOWNS. 253 

of the Osage river — a grand section for vineyards, sheep-farms, and fruit — can 
be had for from fifty cents to five dollars per acre. The bottom lands along the 
Mississippi river are very rich, and are all capable of cultivation. The staple 
products of the State — Indian corn, wheat, rye, oats, barley, buckwheat, potatoes, 
tobacco, hay, grapes, wool and hemp*- — grow luxuriantly and yield largely. f 

The foliage of the Missouri forests is exquisitely beautiful. The timber-lines 
along the creeks, and the great woods, covering hundreds of acres, are alike 
charming. Even in sections where there has been no cultivation, one finds 
delicious lawns shaded by trees, as graceful and luxuriant as if the product of 
the care of centuries. 

The sycamores and oaks are of marvelous height, sometimes measuring 130 
or 140 feet, and on all the forest monarchs hang graceful festoons of wild grape- 
vines, the trumpet-flower, and many pretty winding parasites. In the south-east 
of the State are enormous groves of yellow pine, in whose aisles wild animals 
still stalk fearlessly. But the woodman's axe is rapidly annihilating all these 
beautiful sylvan retreats. 

In journeying across the State along the line of the Kansas City and North- 
ern railroad, I found many little towns of the same unsubstantial outward 
appearance as those I had seen in South-western Missouri during our journey 
Texas- ward. The little villages seemed like those toy ones we play with in 
childhood, and were all of one general plan. "Saloon — -Wines and Liquors" is 
always a conspicuous sign ; and the hum and bustle of the town centres about 
the depot. 

Such places are the outgrowth of the railway ; but the older towns are more 
substantial and interesting. Lexington, Moberly and Mexico are flourishing 
communities in the midst of fertile regions. St. Joseph is perhaps the most 
attractive, as it is the largest, in North-western Missouri. In aspect it is a New 
England town, and is built on hills along the Missouri river — hills which slope 
gently away until they reach rich prairies extending over thousands of acres. 
The sum total of its wholesale and retail trade averages $25,000,000 annually. 
It has costly hotels, theatres, churches, residences, a mammoth bridge across the 
great river, — and 25,000 inhabitants. From St. Joseph a railroad stretches 
across the State to Hannibal, another thriving city. 

But this is digression. These cities properly belong to the North-west, 
whose spirit they manifest, and whose manners and energy they represent. St. 
Louis and the country tributary to it, however, are Southern in interest, and 
must so remain. St. Louis will become one of the greatest clearing-houses of 
the South. Its interests are allied with those of Texas, Arkansas, the Indian 
Territory, and the Mississippi valley. Its rolling-mills must make rails with 
which to lay Southern railroads, and its capital must build mills in which to 
manufacture Southern cotton. 

* In 1870 Missouri produced nearly 4,000,000 pounds of wool; more than 1,000,000 pounds 
of honey; sorghum to the amount of 1,731,000 gallons, and 1,000,000 gallons of wine. 

f There are at present more than 150,000 farms in Missouri, and there is ample room for five 
times as many more. 



254 



ST. CHARLES ST. GENEVIEVE — THE GREAT SWAMP. 



Along the Atlantic and Pacific railway line must come a trade which will 
build St. Louis marvelously fast. Pierce City, Joplin, and dozens of other small 
towns, will become wealthy and important. Springfield, now pioneering in 
cotton manufacture, will be a great spindle centre, like Lowell or Lawrence. 

St. Charles, the little town nestled at the junction of the Missouri and Mis- 
sissippi rivers, looks charmingly picturesque seen from the high bridge over the 
Missouri. The houses are nearly all German in architecture, and their low, 
broad, sloping roofs are huddled into artistic groups. A few steamers lie at the 
levee, others drift lazily along the broad, sheeny tide, between the rich green 
banks. The pretty town is really older than St. Louis, for as " Village des 
Cotes" it was settled two years before Laclede visited the site of St. Louis, and 
was once the seat of the State government, before the legislators betook them- 
selves to the rather prosaic Jefferson City. 

Sainte Genevieve is another romantic old town, and a few venerable French- 
men, lingering on the edge of these moving times, give many stories of the good 
old days when the trappers and voyageurs made it a rendezvous, and the people 
of St. Louis came there to buy provisions. They cannot comprehend the grand 
movement which has made St. Louis a metropolis, and left their village to its 
primitive quiet. They see hundreds of steamers and barges slip down the broad 
current, and it seems to them all a dream. 

There are many pretty, and some prosperous towns along the Mississippi, on 
the Missouri shore, between St. Louis and the section opposite the Ohio's mouth. 
St. Mary's, Wittenberg, Cape Girardeau, are thriving settlements, indicating a 
vigorous growth in the back-country, whence come rough farmers, mounted on 

tough horses, to see the 
boats come in, to get the 
mails, and, mayhap, a little 
whiskey. 

Southward of Cape Gi- 
rardeau begins the " Great 
Swamp," — a magnificent 
wilderness, extending to 
the mouth of the St. 
Francis river, a region 
picturesque enough in its 
wildness and desolation as 
I saw it, when the giant 
stream had overflowed all 
the lowlands, and left noth- 

The Missouri Capitol, at Jefferson City. Jng visible but SL half-Sub- 

merged forest. Cape Girardeau lies on a solid bed of marble, and is called the 
Marble City. New Madrid, a small and unimposing town in the south-eastern 
portion of the State, and on the river, was the scene of the colossal earthquake 
in 1 8 1 1 , when the whole land was moved and swayed like the ocean, and the 
tallest oaks bent like reeds. 




THE EARNESTNESS OF MISSOURI JEFFERSON CITY. 



255 



There are but four States in the Union which out- rank Missouri in the 
amount of manufacturing done within their limits. Those States are New York, 
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, ' and Ohio. It is true that Missouri and Illinois 
are so closely abreast that the supremacy is keenly disputed. The rate per 
cent, of increase in Missouri has, however, been 394 since the war, while that in 
Illinois has been but 257. 

There is an earnestness in the manner in which the Missourian declares his 
determination to place his State at the head of all others, which almost convinces 
one that he will do it. The cash value of the farm lands in the State is fully four 
hundred million dollars, and is steadily increasing. In 1872 the State produced 
almost one hundred million bushels of corn, nearly eight million bushels of wheat, 
and seventeen million bushels of oats. So uniting agriculture and the rapid 
development of manufactures, Missouri has a wonderful future before her. 




"The Cheery Minstrel." [Page 256.J 

St. Louis certainly has considerably more than four hundred thousand inhab- 
itants ; the citizens claim 450,000, and, indeed, it is not improbable, judging from 
the rapidity with which the currents of immigration pour into it and through 
it. The people of Missouri have wisely left their capital in a small town, 
never entrusting it to the influences of a large metropolis, and at Jefferson City a 
legislature assembles, which is usually, though not always, up to the level of the 
State's progress. Jefferson City itself is a prosperous town of seven thousand 
inhabitants, situated on the south bank of the Missouri river, 125 miles west 
of St. Louis. It has been the capital since 1828, the seat of government 
having previously been rather peripatetic, making visits to St. Louis, St Charles, 
and Marion. 

17 



256 THE STATE HOUSE — A TRAVELING MINSTREL. 

The State-House occupies a bluff overhanging the river; the handsome resi- 
dence of the governor, a crowded penitentiary, the Lincoln Institute, and the 
Court- House are the other public buildings. There is abundant and admirable 
limestone in the vicinity, and this alone, so well adapted to the construction of 
serviceable public buildings, may induce the Missourians to locate the capital 
permanently at "Jefferson." The Democrats have been for some time in power, 
and have distinguished themselves rather by a lack of progressive legislation than 
by any tendency to undo the advance already made. 

The State withheld itself from the cause of secession, and the memorable 
phrase of Governor Stewart, in his valedictory in 1861, shows the independence 
and good sense of the masses in the commonwealth: "Missouri will hold to the 
Union so long as it is worth the effort to preserve it. She cannot be frightened 
by the past unfriendly legislation of the North, nor dragooned into secession by 
the restrictive legislation of the extreme South." To-day the best spirit prevails; 
old enemies work in the upbuilding side by side, and the animosities of the 
past are buried under the impressive and fascinating opportunities of the 
present. 

The cheery minstrel, whose portrait our artist has given, makes music on 
the cars between St. Louis and the State capital. He is one of the celebrities 
of Missouri, known to thousands of the traveling public, and when the Legisla- 
ture is in session, and the tide of travel is strong, coins many an honest penny, 
the fruit of much manipulation of harmonicon and triangle. 



XXVI. 



DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI FROM ST. LOUIS. 

" O, starboard side!" 

" Oo-le-oo-le-oo !" 

" Nudder one down dar !" 

THE roustabouts were loading sacks of corn from one of the immense 
elevators at East St. Louis into the recesses of that mammoth steam- 
boat, the "Great Republic," and singing at their toil. Very lustily had they 
worked, these grimy and uncouth men and boys, clad in soiled and ragged 
garments, from early morning, and it was full midnight as we stood listening to 
their song. In their voices, and in the characteristic wail with which each refrain 
ended, there was a kind of grim passion, not unmixed with religious fervor. 
The singers' tones seemed to sink into a lament, as if in despair at faulty expres- 




The Steamer "Great Republic," a Mississippi River Boat. 



sion. But the music kept them steadily at their work, — tugging at the coarse, 
heavy sacks, while the rain poured down in torrents. The "torch-baskets" sent 
forth their cheery light and crackle, and the heat-lightning, so terrible in Mis- 
souri, now and then disclosed to those of us still awake the slumbering city, with 



2 5 3c 



TWELVE HUNDRED MILES BY WATER. 



"Down the steep banks 
would come kaleidoscopic 
processions of negroes and 
flour barrels." [Page 259.] 



its myriad lights, and its sloping hills packed with dark, smoke-discolored 
houses, beyond the river. 

Toward morning, the great steamer turned swiftly round, the very spray from 
the boiling water seeming crowded with oaths, as the officers drove the negroes 
to their several tasks; and the " Great Republic " glided slowly, and with scarcely 
a perceptible motion, down the stream. The blinking lights of the ferries behind 
us faded into distance. We passed tug-boats fuming and growling like monsters, 
drawing after them 
mysterious trains of 
barges ; and finally 
entered upon the 
solitude which one 
finds so impressive 
upon the Mississippi. 

A journey of 
1 ,200 miles by water 
was before us. We 
were sailing from 
the treacherous, 
transition weather 
of Missourian March 
to meet loveliest 
summer robed in 
green, and garlanded with fairest 
blooms. The thought was inspiring. 
Eight days of this restful sailing on the 
gently -throbbing current, and we 
should see the lowlands, the Cherokee 
rose, the jessamine, .the orange-tree. Wakeful and 
pacing the deck, across which blew a chill breeze, 
with my Ulster close about me, I pondered upon 
my journey and the journey's end. 

The "Great Republic" is the largest steamer on 
the Mississippi river, — literally a floating palace. 
The luxuriantly furnished cabin is almost as long and 
quite as ample as the promenade hall in the Hom- 
bourg Kursaal, and has accommodations for 200 
guests. Standing on the upper deck or in the pilot- 
house, one fancies the graceful structure to be at rest, even when going at full 
speed. This is the very luxury of travel An army of servants come and go. 
As in an ocean voyage, breakfast, dinner and tea succeed each other so quickly 
that one regrets the rapid flight of the hours. In the evening there is the 
blaze of the chandeliers, the opened piano, a colored band grouped around it and 
playing tasteful music while the youths and maidens dance. If the weather 
is warm, there are trips about the moonlit wilderness of decks — and flirtations. 





NEGRO 



•ROUSTABOUTS — ^-THE MOUTH OF THE OHIO. 



259 



The two-score negro " roustabouts " on the boat were sources of infinite 
amusement to the passengers. At the small landings the " Great Republic " 
would lower her gang-planks, and down the steep banks would come kaleido- 
scopic processions of negroes and flour barrels. The pilots, perched in their cosy 
cage, twisted- the wheel, and told us strange stories. Romantic enough were 
their accounts of the adventures of steamers in war time, — how they ran the 
gauntlet here, and were seized there ; and how, now and then, Confederate 
shells came crashing uncomfortably near the pilots themselves. The pilots on 
the Western rivers have an association, with head-quarters at St. Louis, and 
branches at Louisville, Pittsburg, and Cincinnati. Each of the seventy-four 
members, on his trip, makes a report of changes in the channel, or obstructions, 
which is forwarded from point to point to all the others. They are men of great 
energy, of quaint, dry humor, and fond of spinning yarns. The genial " Mark 
Twain" served his apprenticeship as pilot, and one of his old companions and 
tutors, now on the " Great Republic," gave us reminiscences of the humorist. 
One sees, on a journey down the Mississippi, where Mark found many of his 
queerest and seemingly impossible types. 

Our first night on the river was so extremely dark that the captain made fast 
to a shelving bank, and the " Great Republic " laid by till early dawn. Then 




The Levee at Cairo, Illinois. 



we sailed down past the fertile bottom lands of Missouri and Illinois, past Grand 
Tower, with its furnaces and crowded villages, past the great cypress swamps 
and the wooded lands, until we came to Cairo, in Illinois, at the junction of the 
Ohio and Mississippi. One broad lake spread a placid sheet above the flat 



260 



THE MISSISSIPPI AS A DESTROYER. 



country at the Ohio's mouth. The "Great Eastern" might have swung round 
in front of the Illinois Central tracks at Cairo. Stopping but to load more bags 
of corn and hogsheads of bacon, with hundreds of clamorous fowls, we turned, 
and once more entered the giant river, which was then beginning to show a 
determination to overflow all proper bounds, and invade the lands upon its banks. 




An Inundated Town on the Mississippi's Bank. 

When the rains have swollen its tributary rivers to more than their ordinary 
volume, the Mississippi is grand, terrible, treacherous. Always subtle and 
serpent-like in its mode of stealing upon its prey, it swallows up acres at one fell 
swoop ; on one side sweeping them away from their frail hold on the main land, 
while, on the other, it covers plantations with slime, and broken tree trunks and 
boughs, forcing the frightened inhabitants into the second story of their cabins, 
and driving the cattle and swine upon high knolls to starve, or perhaps finally to 
drown. It pierces the puny levees which have cost the States bordering upon it 
such immense sums, and goes bubbling and roaring through the crevasses, dis- 
tracting the planters, and sending dismay to millions of people in a single night. 
It promises a fall on one day ; on another it rises so suddenly that the adventur- 
ous woodmen along the border have scarcely time to flee. It makes a lake of 
the fertile country between the two great rivers ; it carries off hundreds of wood- 
piles, which lonely and patient labor has heaped, in the hope that a passing 
steamer will buy them up, and thus reward a season's work. Out of each small 
town on its western bank set too carelessly by the water's edge, it makes a pigmy 
Venice, or floats it off altogether. As the huge steamer glided along on the 
mighty current, we could see families perched in the second stories of their houses, 
gazing grimly out upon the approaching ruin. At one point a man was sculling 
from house to barn-yard with food for his stock. The log barn was a dreary 
pile in the midst of the flood. The swine and cows stood shivering on a pine 
knoll, disconsolately burrowing and browsing. Hailed by some flustered pater- 
familias or plantation master bound to the nearest town for supplies, we took him 
to his destination. As we got below the Arkansas and White rivers, the gigantic 
volume of water had so far overrun its natural boundaries that we seemed at sea, 
instead of upon an inland river. The cottonwoods and cypresses stood up amid 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE "FATHER OF WATERS. 



26l 



the water wilderness like ghosts. Gazing into the long avenues of the sombre 
forests, we could see only the same level, all-enveloping flood. In the open 
country the cabins seemed ready to sail away, though their masters were usually 
smoking with much equanimity, and awaiting a "fall.". ' 

While we are gossiping of the river, let us consider its peculiarities and the 
danger of its inundations more fully. Below the mouth of the Missouri, the 
great river takes a wholly different appearance and character from those of the 
lovely stream which stretches from Lake Pepin down ; and some of the old pilots 
say that section of it below St. Louis should have been called the "Missouri" 
rather than the Mississippi. The Missouri, they claim, gives to the Father of 
Waters most of the characteristics which dominate it until it has been reinforced 






■ 



mm 

■■!), ■ U J, 1 - - r ' 





The Pilot-House of the "Great Republic." [Page 259.] 

by the Ohio, the Arkansas, the White and the Red. The river is forever making 
land on one side, and tearing it away on the other, the bends in its course not 
permitting the current to wash both banks with equal force. The farmer on the 
alluvial bottoms sees with dismay his corn-field diminish year by year, acres slip- 
ping into the dark current ; yet the ease with which corn, cotton and sugar are 
raised in their respective localities along its banks is such that they willingly run 
the risk. The pilots complain bitterly of the constant changes in the channel, 
which it requires the eyes of Argus almost to detect. They say that the current 
might be made to bear more upon the rocky shores, thus avoiding disastrous 
losses of land and many " crevasses," as the gaps made in the levees by the 



262 



THE GENERAL COURSE OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI RIVER. 



encroaching water are called. The stream is so crooked that a twenty miles 
sail by water is sometimes necessary where the distance across the promontory, 
round which the steamer must go, is not more than a mile. Sometimes the 
current, tired of the detour, itself brushes away the promontory, and the 
astonished pilots see a totally new course opened before them. 

The occasional inundations of the alluvial lands are so little understood, and 
the general course of the Mississippi is comprehended by so few, that a little idea 
of its progress downward to the Delta country may prove interesting. 

At the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers properly begins what is 
known as the Lower Mississippi, although the name is not usually applied to the 
stream until it has crossed the grand " rocky chain" or bed extending across its 
channel between St. Louis and Cairo. All below this "chain," in the Mississippi 
valley, is alluvium, through which the river meanders from one bluff to another 
— the bluffs being from forty to one hundred miles apart. Touching these bluffs 
at Commerce, Missouri, on the west bank, it courses across the valley, passing 
the vast prairies of Lower Illinois, known as " Egypt," on the east, meets the 
Ohio at Cairo, then strikes the bluffs again at Columbus, on the eastern or 
Kentucky shore. It skirts these bluffs as far as Memphis, having on its west the 
broad earthquake lands of Missouri and Arkansas. It then once more crosses its 
valley to meet the waters of the White and Arkansas rivers, and skirts the bluffs 
at Helena in Arkansas, flanking and hemming in the St. Francis with her 
swamps and "sunk lands." Reinforced by the White and Arkansas, it again 
crosses its valley to meet the Yazoo near Vicksburg, creating the immense 
Yazoo reservoir on the east bank, extending from the vicinity of Memphis to 
Vicksburg, and the valleys and swamps of the Macon and Tensas, on the west 
side. These latter have no terminus save the Gulf of Mexico, as the river does 
not approach the western bluffs after leaving Helena. From Vicksburg to Baton 
Rouge the river hugs the eastern bluffs, and from Baton Rouge to the mouth is 

the pure " delta country," for a dis- 
tance of more than 200 miles. 

All of this valley below the rocky 
chain crossing the river channel lies 
lower than the high water line of 
this powerful current, and the efforts 
of men to stay an inundation seem 
very puerile. The valley is divided 
into several natural districts, one em- 
bracing the lands from the chain to 
the vicinity of Helena, where the St. 
Francis debouches; another from 
Helena nearly to Vicksburg on the 
east bank, for the Yazoo valley ; a 
third comprises the country from the Arkansas to the Red river, known as the 
Macon and Tensas valley ; a fourth runs from the Red river to the Gulf, on 
the west side ; and a fifth from Baton Rouge to the Gulf on the east side. 




A Crevasse in the Mississippi River's Banks. 



LEVEES AND INUNDATIONS. 263 

Some of these districts have been imperfectly leveed; others have never been 
protected at all, and the general opinion is that when high water does come the 
fact that there are a few levees increases the danger of a complete inundation, as 
the stream, finding itself restrained, breaks the barriers which attempt to control 
its current. Under the slave system; the planters on the lowlands were able to 
guard against ruin by water by elaborate preparation and vigilance, which they 
cannot summon now; and it is believed that nothing but the execution of a 
grand national work by the General Government will ever secure to the delta 
that immunity from ruin so desirable for people already savagely stripped by war 
and political knavery. 

Yet the inundations do not come with alarming frequency. In 1867 the 
lowlands were overflowed and distress ensued; and in this year, 1874, the 
confusion, distress, and trepidation have been terrible to witness. Starvation has 
stood at thousands of doors, and only the hands of the Government and charity 
have saved hundreds from miserable deaths. Below Memphis, and in a wide belt 
of country round about, along the bottom lands in the State of Mississippi, and 
throughout the Louisiana lowlands, there has been immense damage. In an hour 
the planter is doomed to see a thousand acres, which have been carefully pre- 
pared for planting cotton, covered with water two or three feet deep. The 
country round about becomes a swamp — the roads are rivers, the lakes are seas. 

As the Mississippi valley, south and north, will in future be one of the most 
populous sections of the American Union, and as the great network of rivers 
which penetrate to the Rocky Mountains, and the mighty canons of the Maa- 
vaises Terres are so well adapted for commercial highways ; as a score of States 
and Territories border on the Mississippi alone, why should not the National 
Government at once undertake the control and care of the stream and its tribu- 
taries ? 



XXVII. 



MEMPHIS, THE CHIEF CITY OF TENNESSEE- 
CHARACTER. 



■ITS TRADE AND 



PASSING Columbus and Hickman, — two thriving towns on the Kentucky 
shore, — and the ruins of the fortifications on " Island Number Ten," an 
island rapidly sinking in Mississippi's insidious embrace, past Fort Pillow, 
now rounding bends which took us miles out of our way, and now venturing 
through " cut-offs," made by the sudden action of the resistless flood, we skirted 
along the vast desolate Arkansas shore, reached the third Chickasaw bluff on 
the Tennessee side, and saw before us the city of Memphis. 

Memphis is the chief city of Western Tennessee, and, indeed, of the whole 
State. It has been well and widely known ever since the five thousand acre 

tract on the fourth Chickasaw bluff, on 
which the town now stands, came into 
the possession of Judge Overton, 
Major Winchester, and General An- 
drew Jackson, the original proprietors. 
From the river, Memphis presents 
quite an imposing appearance, stately 
piles of buildings running along the 
bluff, at whose foot stretches a levee, 
similar to those of all the other river 
towns. Opposite to it, on the west 
bank of the Mississippi, is the level 
line of the Arkansas bottom, whose 
lowlands are often submerged; and 
from a ferry station at Hopefield a 
railroad leads to Little Rock, the 
Arkansas capital. The streets of 
Memphis are broad, regular, and lined 
with handsome buildings; there is but 
one drawback to their perfection, and 
that is a wooden pavement, so 
badly put down, and so poorly cared 
for, that a ride over it in an omnibus 
is almost unendurable. In the centre of the town is an exquisite little park, 
filled with delicate foliage, where a bust of Andrew Jackson frowns upon 
the tame squirrels frisking around it, or climbing on the visitor's shoulders 




View in the City Park at Memphis, Tennessee. 



THE HEALTH OF MEMPHIS. 265 

and exploring his pockets for chestnuts. Since the terrible visitation of 
yellow fever in 1873, the City Government has made most extraordinary 
efforts to secure perfect drainage and cleanliness in the streets ; and Memphis 
certainly compares favorably in this respect with any of its riparian sisters,, 
Northern or Southern. On the avenues leading from the river toward the 
open country there are many lovely residences surrounded by cool and 
inviting lawns ; the churches and school buildings are handsome and numerous,, 
and there is an air of activity and thrift which I was not prepared to find 
manifested after the severe experiences through which the city has passed. 
Several good newspapers — the Avalanche, the Appeal, the Ledger, and the 
Register, do much to enliven Memphis and the highly prosperous county of 
Shelby, in which it stands ; and the carnival in winter, and the cotton trade until 
midsummer, make excitement the rule. Those who fancied Memphis " dead " 
after the yellow fever's ghastly visitation are wrong ; the number of business 
houses in the city has increased ten per cent, since that terrible event, the 
number of physicians, curious to note, decreasing in exactly the same pro- 
portion. The wholesale trade has been growing enormously, and the influx 
of population has been so very considerable, that Memphis claims to-day about 
65,000 inhabitants. Great injustice has been done the city in former times by 
the false statement extensively published that, after Valparaiso and Prague, 
Memphis had the highest death-rate in the world. The cemetery on the Chick- 
asaw bluff, besides receiving the dead of the city itself, serves as the burial place 
for the dead of all the migratory multitudes who toil up and down the currents 
of the half-dozen giant streams which bring trade and people to Memphis. 
It is quite probable, whatever appearances may indicate, that the death- 
rate of Memphis is no higher than that of any city in the central valley of the 
Mississippi. The city itself occupies a tract of three square miles. Opposite it 
is the centre of a district, one hundred miles square, east of the White and 
St. Francis rivers and west of the Mississippi, which has been for ages enriched 
by the alluvial deposits brought down by the mighty river. It is said that in this 
area there are 5,000,000 acres, each one of which is capable of producing annually 
a bale of cotton. This plain, says a local writer, " was the rich granary of the 
city of the mound-builders, once occupying, as suggested by the great mounds 
on the city's southern confines, the heights on which Memphis stands." North 
of the city lies the famous Big Creek section, the home of many opulent cotton- 
planters before the war, but now but little cultivated, and with many of its fine 
lands deserted. 

Memphis is very near the centre of the cotton belt, and has an enormous sup- 
ply trade with Arkansas, Mississippi, Western Tennessee, and Northern Alabama. 
The export trade of inland ports like Memphis, Macon, and Augusta has become 
so great that the railroads have accorded them very low rates. Much of the 
cotton once sent to New Orleans is now shipped directly across the country to 
Norfolk. The railroad system of Memphis is already very important — as 
follows: The Memphis and Charleston road extends to Stevenson in North Ala- 
bama, and connects with routes to Norfolk and the sea, as well as with those 



266 THE COTTON TRADE RAILWAY CONNECTIONS, 

running northward. It is at present under a lease to the Southern Railway Secur- 
ity Company, but it is expected that the control of the line will in time return to 
the stockholders. Next in importance is the Louisville and Nashville and Great 
Southern railroad, sometimes called the Memphis and Ohio. This line extends 
to Paris, Tennessee, connecting thence to Louisville, Kentucky, and with the 
Memphis and Clarkville and Louisville and Nashville roads. The Mississippi 
and Tennessee road extends from Memphis to Grenada, a smart town in the 
former State, and runs through an excellent cotton - raising, although thinly 
settled country, for one hundred miles, connecting by the Mississippi Central 
with New Orleans. The road to Little Rock gives connection with the network 
in which Texas is tangled ; and the Memphis and Paducah, only partially 
completed, will give almost an air -line to Chicago. The Memphis and Selma 
road is also begun. But the project considered of most importance by the 
citizens of Memphis is the contemplated road from Kansas City to Memphis, 
which would render the latter independent of and in direct competition with 
St. Louis. 

The cotton trade of Memphis represents from $35,000,000 to $40,000,000, 
annually. Its growth has been extraordinary. In 1860-61 Memphis received 
nearly 400,000 bales. She then had also an extensive tobacco trade, which the 
war took from her, and which has never been returned. After the war, produc- 
tion was so crippled that there was but a gradual return to the old figures in the 
cotton trade, as shown by the appended table : 

Year. Bales. Year. Bales. 



1867-68 254,240 

1868-69 247,698 

1869-70 247,654 

1870-71 5 II >432 



I87I-72 380,934 

1872-73 4H,955 

1873-74 up to April 398,637 



The cotton received at Memphis comes mainly from Western Tennessee, 
Northern and Central Alabama, the same sections of Mississippi, and Arkansas, as 
far south as Chicot. The south-eastern portion of Missouri also furnishes some 
cotton to Memphis. The market is made up of buyers from New England 
and the Northern spinning element generally, and from Liverpool, Manchester, 
and the continental ports. Nearly one-third of the receipts, it is said, are now 
taken by foreign shippers. Of course most of those purchases go to Europe 
via Norfolk, New York, or Boston, but one German buyer this season shipped 
forty thousand bales via New Orleans and the Gulf. The character of the cotton 
is such as to make it specially sought after by all classes of spinners. As a cotton- 
port Memphis is independent of New Orleans, and this independence has been 
recently achieved. Of the entire crop brought into Memphis in 1 860-61 there 
were 184,366 bales sent to the Louisiana metropolis: whereas in 1872—73 scarcely 
25,000 bales were sent there for market. The prices are so nearly up to those 
of New Orleans as not to leave a margin. The Louisville and Nashville road 
takes a great deal of cotton northward, and the various packet lines to St. Louis, to 
Cairo, to Cincinnati, Evansville, and Cannelton, carry many hundreds of bales. 



COMMERCE — NEGRO SOCIETIES — STEAMSHIP LINES. 267 

There are so many lines that Memphis is never blockaded. As a single item of 
commerce, that of cotton is enormous, amounting, at an average estimate, to 
something like $28,000,000. It is calculated that the whole commerce of Mem- 
phis foots up $62,000,000 yearly. Thousands on thousands of barrels of flour, 
pork, bales of hay, sacks of oats, barrels of corn-meal, are brought in on the 
Mississippi river and thence dispersed. Besides handling one-eighth of the 
entire cotton crop of the United States, Memphis has thus far kept in food 
as well as in courage a very large portion of the half-discouraged planters of 
the South ; her merchants having made great efforts to accommodate them- 
selves to the new order of things. So changed are all the conditions under 
which planters labor, and so evident is it that the character of planting or 
farming must change a good deal, that the merchants themselves are beginning 
to doubt the real beneficence of the supply system. 

Memphis now has a prosperous Cotton Exchange, and has had an excellent 
Chamber of* Commerce for many years. Shelby county is rich. Its people were 
wont to grumble about taxes, but have at last become wiser, and it was even 
expected, at the date of my visit, that the Mayor, a Republican, would succeed 
in collecting $700,000 of "back taxes." Party lines are not especially regarded 
in city politics, there being a general happy determination to take the best man. 
The negroes have great numbers of societies, masonic, benevolent, and strictly 
religious; and one often sees in a dusky procession, neatly clad, the "Sons" or 
" Daughters of Zion," or the " Independent Pole Bearers," or the " Sons of 
Ham," or the " Social Benevolent Society." 

Memphis has a banking capital of $2,000,000, which for six months of the 
year is ample, but during the cotton season is by no means enough. Her 
schools are excellent, both for white and black, and there is a State Female 
College in the neighborhood. There are numerous excellent Catholic schools, 
to which, as elsewhere in the South, those Protestant parents who do not yet 
look with favor on the free system send their children. For about a year 
the number of pupils in the public schools has been increasing at the rate 
of two hundred monthly. One-fourth of the children in the free schools are 
colored, and one of the school-houses for the blacks contains seven hundred 
pupils. 

In the busy season there are seven steamers a week from St. Louis to Mem- 
phis, and there are three which extend their trips to Vicksburg — a voyage of 
nine hundred miles. The Memphis and St. Louis Packet Company brings down 
about one hundred and fifty thousand tons of freight yearly, and carries up 
stream perhaps forty thousand bales of cotton in the same period. The gigantic 
elevator at Memphis, built on the sloping bluff so that next the water it is of the 
height of an ordinary three-story house, showed only its top floor, so high ran 
the Mississippi, at the time of my visit. From Memphis, steamboats run up the 
Arkansas and the White rivers, threading their way to the interior of Arkansas. 
There is a line to Napoleon, Arkansas, two hundred miles below ; one to the 
plantations on the St. Francis river, and one direct to Cincinnati. The lack 
of confidence between merchant and planter sometimes causes a diminution 



268 



THE YELLOW FEVER AT MEMPHIS. 



in amount of supplies forwarded ; but the dull seasons are brief* The man- 
ufactures of Memphis are not numerous; there are some oil -mills, a few 
foundries, and steam saw -mills for cutting up the superb cypresses from the 
brakes in the western district of Arkansas. 

The yellow fever came to Memphis in 1855 and again in 1867, each time 
having been brought by steamer from below. In 1867 it was quite severe in its 
ravages, but was confined • to the section of the city where it first appeared. In 
August of 1873 it came again, and nothing stayed its course. Two boats arrived 
during the month of August, the " George C. Wolf," from Shreveport, and the 
tow-boat "Bee," from New Orleans, each with a sick man on board. These men 




The Carnival at Memphis, Tennessee — "The gorgeous pageants of the mysterious Memphi." f Page 269.] 

were put off at the upper levee, where there is a coal-fleet, and in front of what is 
known as " Happy Hollow," not far from the remains of the Government navy- 
yard which Memphis once boasted. It is a low, marshy place, which the genius 
of Dickens would have delighted to picture, filled with shanties and flat-boats, 
with old hulks drifted up during high water and then adopted by wretched 'long 

* The writer desires to express his obligations to Mr. J. S. Toof, Secretary Memphis Cotton 
Exchange, and to Messrs. Brower and Thompson of the Avalanche, for many interesting facts 
concerning the city's growth. 



THE MEMPHIS CARNIVAL. 269 

shoremen as their habitations. One of the two men died before he could be 
taken to hospital ; the other shortly after reaching it, and the physicians hinted 
that they thought the disease the yellow fever. For three weeks it was kept in 
"Happy Hollow," then it moved northward through the navy-yard, and suddenly 
several deaths on Promenade street, one of the principal avenues, were announced. 

The authorities then went at their work, but it was too late, except to cleanse 
and disinfect the city. The deaths grew daily more numerous ; funerals blocked 
the way; the stampede began. Tens of thousands of people fled; other thousands, 
not daring to sleep in the plague-smitten town, left Memphis nightly, to return in 
the day. From September until November hardly ten thousand people slept in 
town over night. The streets were almost deserted save by the funeral trains. 
Heroism of the noblest kind was freely shown. Catholic and Protestant clergy- 
men and physicians ran untold risks, and men and women freely laid down their 
lives in charitable service. Twenty- five hundred persons died in the period 
between August and November. The thriving city had become a charnel house. 
But one day there came a frost, and though suffering too severely to be wild in 
their rejoicings, the people knew that the plague itself was doomed. They assem- 
bled and adopted an effective sanitary code, appointed a fine board of health, and 
cleansed the town. Memphis to-day is in far less danger of a repetition of the 
dreadful scenes of last year than are Vicksburg or New Orleans or half-a- 
dozen other Southern cities. Half-a-million dollars contributed by other States 
were expended in the burial of the dead and the needed medical attendance 
during the reign of the plague. 

This terrible visitation did not, however, prevent Memphis from holding her 
annual carnival, and repeating, in the streets so lately filled with funerals, the 
gorgeous pageants of the mysterious Memphi — such as the Egyptians gazed 
on two thousand years before Christ was born, — the pretty theatres being, 
filled with glitter of costumes and the echoes of delicious music. The carnival 
is now so firmly rooted in the affections of the citizens of Memphis that 
nothing can unsettle it. 



XXVIII. 

THE "SUPPLY" SYSTEM IN THE COTTON COUNTRY, AND ITS 
RESULTS — NEGRO LABOR — PRESENT PLANS OF WORKING 
COTTON PLANTATIONS — THE BLACK MAN IN THE MISSIS- 
SIPPI VALLEY. 

AT Memphis I heard much concerning the miseries and revelations of both 
capitalists and laborers in the cotton country. It is easy to see that the 
old planters are in trouble under the new order of things. They are not 
willing to become farmers. " These people will never," said to me a gentleman 
familiar with the whole cotton-planting interest, " grow their own supplies until 
they are compelled to." They choose to depend upon the West for the 
coarse food supplied to negro laborers, and seem totally unconscious of the fact 
that they can never secure white immigration, so much desired, until they raise 
the status of the laboring man. White labor has proved a failure in a great 
many sections of the South, because the laborers who come to make trial are 
not properly met They are offered strong inducements — can purchase good 
lands on almost unlimited credit, and are kindly received — but they find all 
the conditions of labor so repulsive that they become disheartened; and give 
up the experiment. The negro along the Mississippi works better than ever 
before since freedom came to him, because he is obliged to toil or starve, and 
because, being the main stay of the planters, they accord to him very favorable 
conditions. Self-interest is teaching the planters a good deal, and in the 
cotton-growing regions of Northern Alabama and Mississippi, as well as gen- 
erally throughout the older cotton States, a diversity of crops will in time force 
itself upon them as a measure of protection. 

It is noticed that cotton culture is gradually moving from the Atlantic sea- 
board to newer and more productive lands. The States west of the Mississippi, 
and bordering on that stream, are receiving immense colonies of negroes fleeing 
from the temporarily exhausted sections of Alabama, and the lands which they 
have left will soon come under the influence of fertilizers, and corn and rice and 
wheat will be raised. In consequence of the gradual change in the location of 
the planting interest, buyers from the North in such markets as Memphis hear 
from time to time that less cotton is planted than heretofore, and are led to figure 
on higher prices; but they find that new lands are constantly opened up, and that 
the yield on them is surprising. It is the belief of many acute observers living at 
important points along the Mississippi river that the ultimate home of the black 
man is to be west of that stream, on the rich bottom lands where the white man 
has never been known to labor, and where it would be perilous to his health 



OPINIONS OF COTTON PLANTERS. 2J I 

to settle. In the fall and winter of each year the migration to Arkansas and 
Louisiana is alarming to the white planters left behind. In Western Tennessee 
the exodus has not been severely felt as yet, but it will doubtless come. The 
two hundred thousand negroes in that rich and flourishing region are reasonably 
content. They do not, in the various counties, enter so much into politics as 
they did immediately after the war. They show there, as, indeed, almost every- 
where in the Mississippi valley, a tendency to get into communities by them- 
selves, and seem to have no desire to force their way into the company of the 
white man. 

There must, and will be, a radical change in the conduct of the rising gen- 
eration of planters. The younger men are, I think, convinced that it is a mistake 
to depend on Western and Northern markets for the articles of daily consump- 
tion, and for nearly everything which goes to make life tolerable. But the elders, 
grounded by a lifetime of habit in the methods which served them well under 
a slave regime, but which are ruinous now-a-days, will never change their course. 
They will continue to bewail the unfortunate fate to which they think themselves 
condemned — or will rest in the assurance that they can do very well in the 
present chaotic condition of things, provided Providence does not allow their 
crops to fail. They cannot be brought to see that their only safety lies in 
making cotton their surplus crop ; that they must absolutely dig their sus- 
tenance, as well as their riches, out of the ground. 

Before the war, a planter who owned a plantation of two thousand acres, 
and two hundred negroes upon it, would, when he came to make his January 
settlement with his merchant in town, invest whatever there was to his credit 
in more land and more negroes. Now the more land he buys the worse he is 
off, because he finds it very hard to get it worked up to the old standard, and 
unless he does, he can ill afford to buy supplies from the outer world at the 
heavy prices charged for them — or if he can do that, he can accomplish little 
else. As most of his capital was taken from him by the series of events which 
liberated his slaves, he has been compelled, since the war, to undertake his 
planting operations on borrowed capital, or, in other words, has relied on a 
merchant or middle-man to furnish food and clothing for his laborers, and 
all the means necessary to get his crop, baled and weighed, to the market. 
The failure of his crop would, of course, cover him with liabilities ; but such has 
been his fatal persistence in this false system that he has been able to struggle 
through, as in Alabama, three successive crop failures. 

The merchant, somewhat reconciled to the anomalous condition of affairs 
by the large profits he can make on coarse goods brought long distances, has 
himself pushed endurance and courage to an extreme point, and when he dare 
give credit no longer, hosts of planters are often placed in the most painful and 
embarrassing positions. So they gather up the wrecks of their fortunes, pack 
their Lares and Penates in an emigrant wagon or car, and doggedly work their 
way to Texas. 

The appalling failure of crops in certain sections has not, however, lessened 
the cotton production of the region supplied from Memphis. In the aggregate 
18 



272 FALLACY OF THE "SUPPLY SYSTEM." 

it is greater than ever before, and I was informed that its increase would be even 
more than it is if so many planters did not " overcrop " — that is, plant more 
than they can cultivate. Those who plant a little land, and care for it thoroughly, 
usually make some money, even although they depend upon far-off markets for 
their sustenance, and are completely at the mercy of the merchants. It is 
believed that the crop failures will induce planters, in the sections which have 
suffered, to make an effort to grow their own supplies, and until that effort has 
been successful, there can be no real prosperity among them. Even when for- 
tune smiles, and they make a good crop, but little is left after a settlement with 
the merchant. Life is somewhat barren and unattractive to the man who, after 
a laborious season spent in cultivating one staple, finds that, after all, he has only 
made a living out of it. He has done nothing to make his surroundings agree- 
able and comfortable ; his buildings are unsightly and rickety, and there are very 
few stores in his cellar, if indeed he has any cellar at all. 

The region which finds its market and gets its supplies in Memphis, Vicks- 
burg, and Natchez, is probably as fair a sample of the cotton-producing portion 
of the South as any other, and I found in it all the ills and all the advantages 
complained of or claimed elsewhere. Imagine a farming country which depends 
absolutely for its food on the West and North-west ; where every barrel of flour 
which the farmer buys, the bacon which he seems to prefer to the beef and mut- 
ton which he might raise on his own lands, the clothes on his back, the shoes 
on his feet, the very vegetables which the poorest laborer in the Northern agri- 
cultural regions grows in his door-yard — everything, in fact, — has been brought 
hundreds of miles by steamer or by rail, and has passed through the hands of 
the shipper, the carrier, the wharfmen, the reshipper (if the planter live in a 
remote section), and the local merchant ! 

Imagine a people possessed of superior facilities, who might live, as the vulgar 
saying has it, on the fat of the land, who are yet so dependent that a worm 
crawling over a few cotton leaves, or the rise of one or two streams, may reduce 
them to misery and indebtedness from which it will take years to recover ! 
Men who consider themselves poorly paid and badly treated in Northern farming 
and manufacturing regions live better and have more than do the overseers of 
huge plantations in this cotton country. If you enter into conversation with 
people who fare thus poorly, they will tell you that, if they raise vegetables, the 
" niggers " will steal them ; that if times were not so hard, and seasons were not 
so disastrous, the supply system would work very well ; that they cannot organ- 
ize their labor so as to secure a basis on which to calculate safely; and will 
finally end by declaring that the South is ruined forever. 

These are the opinions of the elders mainly. Younger men, who see the 
necessity of change and new organization, believe that they must in future culti- 
vate other crops besides cotton ; that they must do away with supply- merchants, 
and try at least to raise what is needed for sustenance. There are, of course, sec- 
tions where the planter finds it cheapest to obtain his corn and flour from St. 
Louis ; but these are small items. There are a hundred things which he requires, 
and which are grown as well South as North. Until the South has got capital 



PRESENT PLANS OF WORKING PLANTATIONS. 273 

enough together to localize manufactures, the same thing must be said of all 
manufactured articles ; but why should a needless expenditure be encouraged by 
the very people whom it injures and endangers ? 

There are many plans of working large plantations now in vogue, and some- 
times the various systems are all in operation on the same tract. The plan of 
" shares " prevails extensively, the planter taking out the expenses of the crop, 
and, when it is sold, dividing the net proceeds with the negroes who have pro- 
duced it. In some cases in the vicinity of Natchez, land is leased to the freed- 
men on condition that they shall pay so many bales of cotton for the use of so 
many acres, furnishing their own supplies. Other planters lease the land in the. 
same way, and agree to furnish the supplies also. Still others depend entirely 
upon the wages system, but of course have to furnish supplies at the outset, 
deducting the cost from the wages paid hands after the crop is raised. Sometimes 
the plantation is leased to " squads," as they are called, and the "squad leader" 
negotiates the advances, giving "liens" on the squad's share of the^crop and on 
the mules and horses they may own. This plan has worked very well and is 
looked upon favorably. 

Under the slave regime, the negroes working a large plantation were all 
quartered at night in a kind of central group of huts, known as the "quarters;" 
but it has been found an excellent idea to divide up the hundred or five hund- 
red laborers among a number of these little villages, each located on the section 
of the plantation which they have leased. By this process, commonly known as 
"segregation of quarters," many desirable results have been accomplished; the 
negro has been encouraged to devote some attention to his home, and been 
hindered from the vices engendered by excessive crowding. On some plantations 
one may find a dozen squads, each working on a different plan, the planters, 
or land owners, hoping in this way to find out which system will be most advan- 
tageous to themselves and most binding on the negro. 

Clairmont, a plantation of three thousand acres, of which one thousand are 
now cultivated, on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi river, opposite to Natchez, 
is cut up into lots of one hundred acres each, and on each division are ten 
laborers who have leased the land in various ways. It was amusing, by the way, 
to note the calculation that one negro made when negotiating for one of these 
tracts. He was to be allowed one-half, but was vociferous for one-tenth. As ten 
is more than two, he supposed a tenth to be more than a half. On this Clair- 
mont, in i860, the owner raised 1,000 bales of cotton and 8,000 bushels of 
corn; now he raises about 500 bales, and hardly any corn. 

Still, the conduct of the laborers is encouraging. The little villages spring- 
ing up here and there on the broad acres have a tendency to localize the negroes, 
who have heretofore been very much inclined to rove about, and each man is 
allowed to have half an acre of ground for his garden. The supplies spoken 
of as furnished the negroes are of the rudest description — pork, meal and 
molasses — all brought hundreds, nay, thousands of miles, when every one of 
the laborers could, with a little care, grow enough to feed himself and his 
family. 



274 NEGRO LABORERS — THE HEBREW IN TRADE. 

But the negro throughout the cotton belt takes little thought for the mor- 
row. He works lazily, although, in some places, pretty steadily. In others he 
takes a day here and there out of the week in such a manner as to render him 
almost useless. The planter always feels that the negro is irresponsible and 
must be taken care of. If he settles on a small tract of land of his own, as so 
many thousand do now-a-days, he becomes almost a cumberer of the ground, 
caring for nothing save to get a living, and raising only a bale of cotton or so 
wherewith to get "supplies." For the rest he can fish and hunt He does n't 
care to become a scientific farmer. Thrift has no charms for him. He has never 
been educated to care for himself; how should he suddenly leap forth, a new 
man, into the changed order of things ? 

Nevertheless, some of the planters along the river near Natchez said, " Give 
the negro his due. The merchant will ordinarily stand a better chance of collect- 
ing all his advance from fifty small black planters than from fifty whites of the 
same class, when the crop is successful." But if the negro's crop fails, he feels 
very loth to pay up, although he may have the means. He seems to think 
the debt has become outlawed. In success he is generally certain to pay his 
"store account," which is varied, and comprehends a history of his progress 
during the year. 

The shrewd Hebrew, who has entered into the commerce of the South in 
such a manner as almost to preclude Gentile competition, understands the 
freedman very well, and manages him in trade. The negro likes to be treated 
with consideration when he visits the " store," and he finds something refreshing 
and friendly in the profuse European manner and enthusiastic lingo of Messrs. 
Moses and Abraham. The Hebrew merchants have large establishments in all 
the planting districts. In Mississippi and in some other sections they have made 
more than ioo per cent, retail profit, and excuse themselves for it by saying 
that as they do not always get their money, they must make up for bad debts. 
They are obliged to watch both white and black planters who procure advances 
from them, to make sure that they produce a crop. If the merchant sees that 
there is likely to be but half a crop, he sometimes notifies the planters that they 
must thereafter draw only half the amount agreed upon at the outset. In short, 
in some sections the Hebrew is the taskmaster, arbiter and guardian of the 
planters' destinies. 

Some of the elder planters are liberal in their ideas, and would welcome a 
complete change in the labor system, but they do not believe one possible. One 
of the best known and influential in the valley told me that he and his neigh- 
bors in the magnificent Yazoo country, where the superb fertility of the soil gives 
encouragement even to the rudest labors, had tried every expedient to bring new 
labor into their section, but could not succeed. His laborers were now practically 
his tenants; but he had to supply them and to watch over them, very much as he 
did before the war. He was willing to admit that the negro was better adapted 
to the work than any white man who might come there ; but thought the younger 
generation of negroes was growing up idle and shiftless, fond of whiskey and 
carousing, and that the race was diminishing in fibre and strength. Those who 



LOUISIANA COTTON PLANTATIONS SINCE THE WAR. 275 

had been slaves were industrious, and conducted themselves as well as they knew 
how ; but the others, both men and women, seemed to think that liberty 
meant license, and acted accordingly. They were wasteful, and there was 
but little chance of making them a frugal and foresighted farming people. 
Whenever they could secure a little money the ground in front of their cabins 
would be strewn with sardine boxes and whiskey bottles. 

The planters in the lowlands of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana have 
been particularly troubled to get and keep serviceable plantation labor ; and are 
now importing large numbers from Alabama. In truth, the hundreds who flock 
in from the older cotton States were starving at home. On a plantation in Con- 
cordia parish, in Louisiana, opposite Natchez, there are many of these Alabama 
negroes. One planter went into the interior of that State, and engaged a 
hundred and twenty-five to follow him. They did not succeed in leaving 
without meeting with remonstrances from the colored politicians, but were glad 
to flee from an empty cupboard. 

• Densely ignorant as these negroes are, they are yet capable of fine develop- 
ment. They have sound sense, and some idea of manners, seem well-inclined 
toward their employers, and appear to appreciate their own defects. On many 
of these plantations on the lowlands the negroes do not vote ; on some they are 
even hired with the distinct understanding that they shall not, unless they wish 
to be discharged. But sooner or later the politicians reach them, and they 
become political victims. 

I took a ride one morning in this same Concordia parish for the purpose of 
conversing with the planters, and getting testimony as to the actual condition 
of the laborers. Concordia was once the garden spot of Louisiana ; its aspect 
was European ; the fine roads were bordered with delicious hedges of Cherokee 
rose ; grand trees, moss-hung and fantastic in foliage, grew along the green banks 
of a lovely lake ; every few miles a picturesque grouping of coarsely thatched 
roofs marked negro " quarters," and near by gleamed the roof of some planter's 
mansion. In this parish there was no law and but little order — save such as the 
inhabitants chose to maintain. The negroes whom I met on the road were 
nearly all armed, most of them carrying a rifle over their shoulders, or balanced 
on the backs of the mules they were riding. Affrays among the negroes are 
very common throughout that region ; but, unless the provocation has been 
very great, they rarely kill a white man. 

In a trip of perhaps ten miles I passed through several once prosperous 
plantations, and made special inquiries as to their present condition. Upon one 
where six hundred bales of cotton were annually produced under slave culture, 
the average annual yield is now but two hundred and fifty ; on another the 
yearly average had fallen from one thousand to three hundred bales; and on two 
others which together gave the market fifteen hundred bales every year, now 
barely six hundred are raised. The planters in this section thought that cotton 
production had fallen off fully two-thirds. The number of negroes at work on 
each of these plantations was generally much less than before the war. Then a 
bale to the acre was realized, now about one bale to three acres is the average. 



276 WAGES PAID NEGROES DIVERSIFIED FARM CULTURE NEEDED 

Much of this land is "leased" to the negro at the rate of a bale of cotton weigh- 
ing four hundred and thirty pounds for each six acres. 

The planters there raise a little corn, but are mainly supplied from the West. 
The inundation was upon them at the epoch of my visit, and they were in 
momentary expectation of seeing all their year's hopes destroyed. The infamous 
robberies, also, to which they had been subjected by the Legislature, and the 
overwhelming taxation, had left them bitterly discouraged. One plantation 
which I visited, having sixteen hundred acres of cleared land in it, and standing 
in one of the most fertile sections of the State, was originally valued at one 
hundred dollars per acre ; now it could not be sold for ten dollars. In Madison 
parish recently a plantation of six hundred improved acres, which originally 
cost thirty thousand dollars, was offered to a neighboring planter for seven 
hundred dollars. 

The "wages" accorded the negro, when he works on the wages system, 
amount to fifteen or sixteen dollars monthly. But few ever save any money; and 
this remark will, I think, apply to the majority of the negroes engaged in agricul- 
ture throughout the cotton region of the Mississippi valley. Still there are 
praiseworthy exceptions to this general rule. Enormous prices are placed upon 
everything, because of the cost of transportation. The grangers have accom- 
plished some good in the cotton States by buying for cash and selling for cash, 
the object being to keep supplies as near the wholesale price as possible, and 
have already become a formidable organization there, having scores of societies, 
small and large, in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. 

While there is no doubt that an active, moneyed, and earnest immigration 
would do much toward building up the southern portion of the Mississippi valley, 
it is evident that so long as the negro remains in his present ignorance, and both 
he and the planter rely on other States for their sustenance, and on Providence 
never to send them rainy days, inundations, or caterpillars, the development of 
the section will be subject to too serious drawbacks to allow of any considerable 
progress. All the expedients, the tenant systems, and years of accidental success 
will not take the place of thorough and diversified culture, and intelligent, con- 
tented labor resulting from fair wages for fair work. Nothing but the education 
of the negro up to the point of ambition, foresight, and a desire to acquire a 
competence lawfully and laboriously, will ever thoroughly develop the Lower 
Mississippi valley. As the negro is certainly to inhabit it for many years at 
least, if not forever, how shall he learn the much-needed lesson ? 

On the other hand, the whites need to be converted to a sense of the dignity 
of labor, to learn to treat the laboring man with proper consideration, to create 
in him an intelligent ambition by giving him education. Something besides an 
introduction to political liberties and responsibilities is needed to make the 
negro a moral and worthy citizen. He is struggling slowly and not very surely 
out of a lax and barbarously immoral condition. The weight of nearly two 
centuries of slavery is upon his back. He needs more help and counsel. An 
old master will tell you that he can discover who of his employe's has been a 
slave, "for the slave," he says, "cannot look you in the eye without flinching." 



THE FREEDMAN S DILEMMA. 



277 



Neither can the ex-slave be very, moral, if indeed moral at all. It is hard for 
him to bear the yoke of the family relation. Although conscious that he is a 
freeman, and can leave his employer in the lurch if he chooses, he is, here and 
there, almost content to slip back into the old devil-may-care dependence of 
slavery. The responsibilities of freedom are almost too much for him. He has 
entered upon a battle-field armed with poor and cumbersome weapons, weighed 
down with ignorance and "previous condition ;" and I venture to say that no one 
feels the difficulty and bitterness of his position more keenly than he does himself. 

Unable as he is to aid in his own upbuilding, it is to be considered whether 
there is not really more room now for educational enterprises, and for a general 
diffusion of intelligence among his race, by Northern and Western men and 
women, than there was immediately after the war. Might it not be wise to 
appoint commissioners to investigate thoroughly the labor question in the 
South, and to make a final effort to remedy its evils by every proper means ? 
Events have shown that the National Government must undertake the improve- 
ment and the control of the Mississippi river ; why ought it not to devote some 
little attention to the removal of the obstacles to immigration into the most 
fertile sections of the Mississippi valley ? 




A Steamboat Torch -Basket 



XXIX. 

ARKANSAS ITS RESOURCES ITS PEOPLE ITS POLITICS. 

TAXATION — THE HOT SPRINGS. 

NEARLY two hundred miles below Memphis, at the mouth of the Arkansas 
river, and on lowlands which, when I saw them, were drowned and 
buried under the combined flood of the two great rivers, stands Napoleon, 
once a flourishing town, but now gradually slipping away into the stream. 
The only other towns on the Arkansas bank of the river, of importance, are 
Sterling, which lies at the mouth of the St. Francis river, and Helena, a rather 
thriving and vigorous community of five thousand inhabitants. The White 
river, which was the scene of much fighting during the war, comes down 
from the wilds a little above Napoleon, and pours its floods into the Arkan- 
sas. Napoleon did not have a good reputation in past days. Various anec- 
dotes, not entirely devoid of grim humor, were told of it, as illustrating the 
manners of the town. It was at Napoleon that the man showed a casual 
passer-by on a steamboat a pocket full of ears, and, with a grin, announced 
that he was among the boys while they were having a frolic last night. 
Murder, daily, was the rule, and not the exception. Brawls always ended in 
burials. Even now-a-days there are occasional scenes, which end in furious 
free fights. A pilot on one of the up-river steamers one day went into a 
saloon where a group were playing cards. The bystanders laughed at the 
loser, and the pilot laughed too. Being a stranger, his laughter was resented 
by the loser, who pulled a bowie-knife from his boot, and made a desperate 
lunge at him. The pilot returned to his boat. But the river is yearly more 
and more closely embracing the doomed town, and the roughs, like the rats, 
will leave before the final engulfing comes. In war time, Napoleon was an 
important rendezvous for gunboats and other warlike craft ; the United States 
Marine Hospital there had been seized by the Confederates when Arkansas 
seceded, but was recovered as soon as the Mississippi was partially opened. 

These wild and weird forests and swamps bordering the junction of the 
Arkansas and Mississippi were threaded by the French as early as 1671, and 
the State now known as Arkansas was a part of Louisiana until the purchase 
made by the United States in 18 12. It had a varying fortune for some time 
thereafter; was made a territory in 18 19, then became part of Missouri terri- 
tory, but was finally admitted into the Union as a separate State in 1836. 
Arkansas is in area one -sixth larger than the State of New York, comprising 
more than fifty-two thousand square miles. It is separated by Nature into 
two important divisions — the one comprehending some of the richest agricul- 



THE STATE OF ARKANSAS ITS RIVERS. 



279 



tural bottom lands in the world, the other containing vast deposits of valuable 
minerals. The mountain ranges, beginning in the south-western part of the 
State, develop into the Masserne range, and toward the north and east become 
broad, elevated tracts until they reach the Ozark mountains, which run from 
the vicinity of Little Rock, north and west, into Missouri. The often- repeated 
remark that "Arkansas is all swamp and backwoods" is an error inexcusable in 
one who travels so much as does the average American. There are tracts along 
the Mississippi which certainly are swamps, and will remain such until reclaimed 
by some general system of drainage ; but they comprehend but a small portion 



k&^'rrgi$$%$ 





View on the Arkansas River at Little Rock. 

even of the lowlands. Drainage is necessary both to render the land productive, 
and to guard against the spread of pernicious climatic diseases.* The lands 
which extend from Napoleon to Memphis on the Arkansas side form the nucleus 
of a mighty lowland empire. Drained, settled, and carefully cultured, they 
would produce almost incalculable wealth. The negro is the man for this work. 
He is adapted to the climate, and if he had but the ambition, could speedily 
enrich himself. 

The Arkansas river journeys two thousand miles to meet the Mississippi 
coming eastward from the mountains of Colorado ; and the entrance from it into 
the White river, near its mouth, is easy. The White river drains, with its tribu- 
taries, a large expanse in the north-western, middle, and south-eastern parts of 
the State, and renders the transportation of products easy and inexpensive. The 
Arkansas forms a superb water-way directly across the State, and into the 
recesses of the Indian Territory. It is navigable for several months in the year, 
and with needed improvements might be always serviceable. The Ouachita and 
its contributing streams drain that part of the State lying south of the Arkansas 
river, and the Red river gives drainage to the south-west. It would be difficult 
to find another State of which it can be said that of its seventy-three counties 
fifty-one are watered by navigable streams. The climate varies with the location, 
but none could be healthier than that of the romantic mountain region ; more 
invigorating than that of the thick pine forests in the lower counties ; or more 
malarial than are the undrained and uncleared bottom lands. 



Resources of Arkansas," by James P. Henry. 



2SO THE ST. LOUIS, SOUTHERN AND IRON MOUNTAIN RAILROAD. 

Time was when a journey up the Arkansas river was not devoid of thrilling 
adventure ; when the passengers stopping at Little Rock laid their bowie-knives 
and pistols beside their knives and forks, on the hotel table, at supper ; and when 
along the river-bank could be heard the pistol-shot from time to time. Great 
numbers of outlaws from the older States came to Arkansas when it was first 
opened up, and, fascinated with the grandeur and beauty of the more elevated 
portions of the State, they remained there, — some to become honest and hard- 
working citizens, others to pursue their old callings of robbery and murder, and 
finally to die at the muzzle of a rifle. Wild life and careless culture of the soil, 
disregard of humanizing influences, and a general spirit of indifference, character- 
ized large numbers of the people ; while others were as orderly, enterprising and 
industrious as those to be found in any of the older States. But the common- 
wealth has thus far been completely terra incognita to the people of the North 
and East. No railroads, up to a very recent date, have penetrated its fertile 
lands ; river navigation has been tedious and unattractive ; and the stories, more 
or less exaggerated, told of the sanguinary propensities of some classes of the 
inhabitants, were such a grotesque mixture of fun and horror, that civilized peo- 
ple had no more desire to go there than to Central Africa. 

But now the most effective civilizer, the iron rail, has been laid across 
the State. The St. Louis, Southern, and Iron Mountain railroad has stretched an 
arm from the Missouri border down the Black and White River valleys to Little 
Rock, the pretty and flourishing capital of the commonwealth ; thence through 
Arkadelphia, along the Ouachita valley, and across the Little Missouri and the 
Red River valley to the Texas boundary, where it connects with the Inter- 
national and Great Northern and the Trans- Continental. In other words, it has 
placed Arkansas on the direct high road to Texas, and opened up to settlement, 
on terms which the poorest immigrant can accept, good lands for raising corn and 
the smaller grains; uplands wooded with pine, and bottoms all through the Red 
River valley timbered with walnut, oak and ash, noble cotton lands, and a fine 
country for fruit and grapes. The wild grape grows abundantly in the forests, 
and to large size. Along the line of this railroad also are scattered iron, coal, 
kaolin, and clay in large deposits. That portion of the road extending from the 
Missouri border down was built as the Cairo and Fulton railroad, giving a 
through line from Cairo, on the Mississippi, to Fulton, on the Texas line ; but it 
is now consolidated with the St. Louis and Iron Mountain road, which has 
recently completed its line from St. Louis to Little Rock, running through the 
range of mineral mountains in South-eastern Missouri, and uniting with the 
Cairo and Fulton route at Newport. In the White River valley there are 
some of the loveliest river bottom lands on the continent, where cotton yields a 
bale or a bale and a- half, corn seventy- five bushels, and wheat twenty- five 
bushels to the acre. This section of Arkansas is also admirably suited for the 
culture of tobacco and hemp, besides being an excellent fruit and stock country. 
Along this mammoth line of rail, nearly two million of acres, confirmed to the 
company by act of Congress, are now in market, and immigrants are rapidly 
settling at distances of five and ten miles from the railroad. 



LITTLE ROCK, THE ARKANSAS CAPITAL. 



28l 



The Arkansas river at Little Rock is broad and noble, and here and there 
the bluffs are imoosing. The town is said to take its name from a small rock 
on the west side of the stream, — the first one encountered on that side from the 
mouth of the Mississippi to that point, — so level is the alluvial. Some distance 
up stream, on the east bank of the Arkansas, stands Big Rock, a bluff of a little 
prominence. The river is handsomely bridged for the railroad's convenience, and 
Little Rock, since the iron horse first snorted in its streets, has had a wonderful 
growth. It is a handsome, well laid out town, containing 20,000 inhabitants ; 
and one can see, from any eminence, hundreds of small, neat houses — the best 
testimonials to individual thrift in a community. The handsome but somewhat 
dilapidated State Capitol, the picturesque Penitentiary, perched on a rocky hill, 
the Deaf and Dumb State Asylum, the Asylum for the Blind, the land offices of 




The Arkansas State Capitol — Little Rock. 

the railroad companies, St. John's College, and St. Mary's Academy, are among 
its best public buildings. Many of its streets are beautifully shaded, and the 
peach-trees were in bloom on the March days when I visited it. The main part 
of the city lies on a high, rolling plateau overlooking the river; back at some 
distance from the stream is the arsenal and post where United States troops are 
still stationed, and near by is a national cemetery. Little Rock was for many 
years the home of General Albert Pike, the noted Confederate general and poet, 
and his mansion is pointed out with pride by the people of the State. There, 
too, lived for many years the original of the "Arkansas Traveler," whose story 
has penetrated to the uttermost ends of the earth ; and there the negro has done 
much to increase one's faith in his capacity for industry and progress. 

The colored citizens of Little Rock and of Arkansas in general, number many 
gentlemen of education and refinement. The Superintendent of the Penitentiary, 



282 COLORED CITIZENS THE STATE DEBT. 

the Commissioner of State Lands, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, some 
of the State senators, police judges, and many preachers of excellent ability, are 
colored men. Among these gentlemen are graduates of Harvard University and 
of Oberlin, and of many of the best Western schools. A large proportion of the 
colored people at Little Rock own their own homes, which are mainly in the 
third ward, whence two aldermen, — black men and slaves up to the war, but 
now worth from $5,000 to $10,000 each, — are sent up to the Council. At 
Helena and Little Rock there have been many noteworthy instances of progress 
among the negroes. This is not so common in the back-country, although some 
of the counties have colored sheriffs and clerks. One of the most intelligent of 
his race in the State told me that the negroes had, as a rule, a horror of clearing 
up new land, and that they had been a good deal hindered from undertaking 
cotton-farming by the lack of means to begin with, — this requiring quite an 
outlay. The large landholders, too, have generally been averse to selling land in 
small parcels. For these reasons the country negroes are mainly "hired labor- 
ers, working on shares, or tenants by rental, payable in produce." In either 
case the landlord often furnishes the supplies of food, seed and stock, and at the 
annual settlement has the lion's share of the proceeds, the laborers making little 
more than their living for the year. A very reliable colored man told me that if 
the freedmen of Arkansas had made less progress since the war than those of the 
elder States since emancipation, he believed it to be because the white population 
of Arkansas was also, in many respects, behind that of the other States, being 
more sparsely settled and isolated, without large towns, railroads, and other 
improving agencies. The educational societies of the North had comparatively 
neglected the State. Political commotions had been the rule ever since recon- 
struction, and the State was already bankrupt at the outbreak of the war. The 
Republican party, which came in with reconstruction, inaugurated vast schemes 
for " internal improvements," and to obtain means to carry on said improve- 
ments, funded the old ante-bellum bonds of the State as a pledge of good faith. 
This process, he thought, had resulted in a large increase of the State debt, the 
debt in onerous taxation, and the taxation in a high rental. The State bonds 
outstanding March 14, 1874, are classified as follows : 

Railroad aid bonds $5,350,000 

Funded bond, July 1, 1869 2,000,000 

Funded bond, January 1, 1870 2,350,000 

Levee bonds 2,208,500 

Outstanding insurance certificates 1,600,000 

Some manufacturing has been introduced at Little Rock, and the wholesale 
trade of the town is very large, although as no organized chamber of commerce 
yet exists, I could not discover its amount. At the close of the war it was only 
a small village, with little or no railroad outlet, and with a minor trade. Planters 
had been in the habit of bringing almost literally everything which they needed 
from Memphis ; the idea of keeping supplies in the State had never occurred to 
them. Now the through route to Texas, the Memphis and Little Rock, and the 



THE CHARACTER OF THE ARKANSAS PEOPLE. 283 

Little Rock and Fort Smith railroads give plenty of outlets, and are bringing the 
town considerable new population. The latter route, in which a- good many 
Eastern men are interested, is not yet completed, and is in wretched financial 
and material condition, but it runs through a fine country, and, if ever finished, 
will develop the most interesting portion of Arkansas. The noble country along 
the borders of the Indian Territory needs developing: it is rich in minerals and 
in grand mountain scenery, but is now in semi-barbaric hands, and it will take a 
persistent effort to improve the tone of society there. Fort Smith is on the 
Arkansas river and the border of the Territory, has a population of 3,000, is a 
military post whence offenders from the Indian Territory are taken to be tried, 
and once had a very extensive Western trade, which has been taken away by 
the passage of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line of rail within sixty-five 
miles of the town. Society throughout this section is said to be improving. 
My own opinion is that it will never improve much in the face of ignorance, 
whiskey, and weapons. Most of the deadly broils occur between drunken 
ruffians, whose only sentiment is revenge by pistol-shot, and whose chief amuse- 
ment is coarse and bestial intoxication. The " Fort Smith road " runs through 
the counties of Pulaski, Vincennes, Faulkner, Conway, Pope, Johnson, Franklin, 
Crawford, and Sebastian. Conway, Lewisburgh, and Russelville promise to be 
important towns along the line, although the local business is thus far slight. 

Over the 33,000,000 of acres in Arkansas are scattered barely 500,000 people, 
and the nature of their employment forbids the building of many large towns. 
The grade of intelligence in the interior districts, where they have never had 
schools, is much the same as in Eastern Tennessee. There are fewer churches 
than school-houses in the "up-country." The masses of the whites are ambi- 
tionless ; and even the most enthusiastic that I met seemed dubious about the 
State's prospects. The north-eastern current of immigration is wanted, and 
would do much toward reforming the State. Something beyond a rough pros- 
perity in cotton-raising and whiskey seems to be demanded ; and the cultured 
people living in the larger towns are making special efforts to redeem the com- 
monwealth from the bad name it has received. Certainly Little Rock's hand- 
some development should do much to make one believe in the State's possibili- 
ties ; it has a flourishing library, a dozen good churches, several well-ordered 
banks, and fine streets ; society and schools are as good as in Eastern towns of 
the same size. But in the back-country! — there the prospect is very different. 
Little Rock, with its streets and gardens filled with azaleas, japonicas, China and 
peach-trees, the queenly magnolia, and the lovely box-elders and elms, is a 
striking contrast to some of the rude lowland towns near the river, or the log- 
built, unkempt settlements in the interior, where morals are bad, manners worse, 
and there are no comforts or graces. The Presbyterian Church South is the 
prevailing denomination at Little Rock, and Northern people worship in it, 
politics being eschewed. The schools are, of course, classified for black and 
white ; mixed schools having been nowhere attempted, or, indeed, demanded. 
The Industrial University at Fayetteville is to be a powerful institution, and the 
Judsonian University, located at Judsonia, in White county, is one of the hopes 



284 SCHOOLS VEXATIONS IN POLITICS. 

of the future. Schools have been organized and maintained for a number of 
years in Fort Smith, Pine Bluffs, Helena, Arkadelphia, Dardanelle and Camden, 
and have been well attended by both white and black children. The State 
Superintendent could not inform me how many schools were in operation in the 
community ; inasmuch as he had to operate with only the semi-annual appor- 
tionment of $55,000 in State scrip, worth forty cents on the dollar, he could not 
make much new effort. He admitted that but little progress in education had as 
yet been made in the remote parts of Arkansas ; the thinly settled character of 
the region preventing neighborhood schools. 

The vexed condition of politics in the State since the war has greatly hin- 
dered its development. People complained a good deal of the manner in which 
the Arkansas Central (narrow gauge) railroad scheme was conducted. This road 
is now in operation from Helena to Clarendon, and is eventually to be completed 
to Little Rock. It traverses one of the best cotton-producing regions in the South. 
Its completion is hindered by the anomalous condition of affairs in the State, and 
by the various accusations brought against its builders as to the manner in which 
they obtained the money to build it with. The Little Rock, Pine Bluff and New 
Orleans road now runs from Chicot to Pine Bluff, and will this year reach Little 
Rock. The Mississippi, Ouachita and Red River road is intended to run across 
the State from Chicot, on the Mississippi, to Texarcana, on the Red river. The 
Ouachita Valley road extends from Arkadelphia to Camden, and thence will con- 
nect with Monroe in Louisiana. Camden is one of the largest towns in Southern 
Arkansas, in the heart of a fine cotton-growing section. It will be seen that as 
soon as these projected lines are completed, Arkansas will be very thoroughly 
traversed by roads, and, with her splendid river highways, will find no difficulty 
in annually sending an early crop to Memphis and New Orleans. Steamers can 
reach Camden from New Orleans coming up the Red and Ouachita rivers, and 
thousands of bales of cotton annually go to New Orleans that way. But these 
facilities for communication cannot enrich the State so long as an appeal to arms 
by a discontented faction may at any time overthrow law, destroy order, and turn 
towns into camps. There seems to have been, since the close of the war, the 
most bitter struggle between the different factions, sometimes resulting in blood- 
shed, and always in a paralysis of the State's vitality for some time after the 
combat. The partisans in a State where the use of arms is so common as it is in 
Arkansas are, of course, violent and vindictive, and a good many lives are wasted 
in useless struggling to prevent those sudden changes in party sentiment which 
are inevitable.. When Governor Clayton was elected to the United States Sena- 
torship, he was seemingly unwilling to allow his successor to take his office, for 
fear that he might change the course of the party. So, recently, the Republican 
Governor now in office, having inaugurated his course by promising something 
like an honest administration, and by uniting around him the more reputable of 
the old Conservatives — in other words, by bringing politics, to a certain extent, 
back to their normal condition, and not controlling the intelligent property- 
owners by ignorant and incompetent office-holders — was temporarily ousted by 
the beaten candidate, who brought a formidable army at his back, expelled the 



THE ARKANSAS WAR TAXES RESOURCES. 285 

rightful Governor, Mr. Baxter, and opened the way to a series of arrests and 
counter-arrests, which would have been laughable had they not been so disgust- 
ing to any one possessing a high ideal of republican government. It required the 
interference of the Federal Government to secure the reinstatement of Governor 
Baxter, and the would-be usurper, who had mustered at his back a Falstaffian 
army of idle and worthless fellows, retired only when the proclamation of the 
President warned him to do so. The re-establishment of law and order was 
followed by a popular vote on the question of holding a new constitutional con- 
vention. The election occurred in July, and the people of the State affirmed, 
by more than seventy thousand majority, their desire for a convention. Several 
important amendments to the constitution will, doubtless, be made ; some of the 
elder Democrats have already manifested a disposition to return to the illiberal 
ante-bellum policy with regard to general taxation. 

Taxes in the State now are nearly six per cent. The vicious system of 
issuing State warrants is pursued in Arkansas as in Louisiana, and with the same 
disastrous results. A stern reign of law and order for four years would fill 
Arkansas with immigrants ; but a coup d'etat every four years will not be very 
reassuring. The Legislature should enact a law forbidding the bearing of arms, 
and should enforce it if possible. Murder is considered altogether too trivial an 
offense in Arkansas. I walked through the Penitentiary at Little Rock, and saw 
a large number of white and black criminals who were serving life, or long term 
sentences for homicide. A brace of negroes working at the prison forge were 
murderers; an old man, peacefully toiling at a carpenter's bench, was a murderer; 
a young negro, hewing a log, was a murderer; and in a dark cell, a murderer, 
stretched on his iron bedstead, was sleeping off the terrors which had partially 
subsided with the reprieve just sent him. The Governor had fifteen proclama- 
tions, offering rewards for murderers, flying about the State at the date of my 
visit. The day before I left Little Rock, however, a desperado was hung in the 
neighboring town of Clarksville, and it was thought that the execution would 
have a salutary effect on the lawless element. 

The resources of Arkansas are, like those of all the other Southern and South- 
western States, as yet but little drawn upon by the resident population; and they 
are immense. Arkansas contains twelve thousand square miles of coal,* and a 
valuable coal-basin is situated along both sides of the Arkansas river. In Sebas- 
tian county there are veins from three to six feet thick. A lead belt extends 
diagonally across the State ; the lead and silver mines in Sevier county promise 
much clay. Kaolin, gypsum, copper, and zinc are found in profusion, manganese, 
ochre, and paint- earths are to be had in many counties ; and there are vast 
quarries of slate, whetstone, limestone, and marble. Iron ore has been discov- 
ered at various points; but the coal -stores are the great treasure, and must 
some time enrich the State. 

The St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern railroad has brought the Hot 
Springs, that famous Bethesda of the rheumatic and scrofulous unfortunate, within 
convenient distance of a Pullman palace-car. The staging is now eighteen 

* Testimony of the State Geologist. 



286 



THE HOT SPRINGS OF ARKANSAS. 



instead of eighty-five miles to this Bad-Gastein of America, which lies in a wild, 
mountainous region near the line of the St. Louis, Southern and Iron Mountain 
road. The hot springs issue from the western slope of a spur of the Ozark 
range, about fourteen hundred feet above the sea-level. There are now nearly 
sixty of these springs, new ones appearing annually. Their temperature 
varies from ninety- five to one hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and they 
discharge something like three hundred gallons per minute. Thousands of 
discouraged pilgrims flock to Hot Springs yearly, and return much recovered ; 
while those who do not achieve a cure experience great relief. The town lies in 
a valley which follows the Hot Spring creek, and is very well supplied with 





The Hot Springs, Arkansas. 

hotels and neat but inexpensive residences. I did not penetrate to the Springs 
but heard very powerful testimony in their behalf. It is expected, and, I think 
desired, that the United States, which has a disputed claim to the " Hot Springs 
reservation," should succeed in getting possession, and making the valley a grand 
sanitary resort free to the people. 

The forests of Arkansas offer the most stupendous chances for the develop- 
ment of State wealth. The yellow pine and cypress, the cedar, the cottonwood, 
the mulberry, the oaks, hickories, pecans, and ash, can be borne easily to market 
on the bosoms of the great currents near which they grow. There are still 
eight millions of acres of land belonging to the United States subject to home- 
stead entry, and these are among the best in Arkansas. A decent State 
government, and the progress of education among the masses, would enable the 
State to leap into as wonderful a growth as that achieved by Texas and Missouri. 
But there is a great deal to do before that prosperity can be achieved. 



XXX. 



VICKSBURG AND NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI — SOCIETY AND POLITICS. 
A LOUISIANA PARISH JURY. 



THE journey along the Mississippi river from Napoleon, on the Arkansas 
shore, to Vicksburg, the largest town in the State of Mississippi, discloses 
naught save vast and gloomy stretches of forest and flat, of swamp and inlet, of 
broad current and green island, until Columbia, a pretty town on the Arkansas 
side, is passed. Below Columbia the banks of the river are lined with cotton 
plantations for more than 150 miles. 

Vicksburg, the tried and troubled hill- city, her crumbling bluffs still filled 
with historic memorials of one of the most desperate sieges and defences of 
modern times, rises in quite imposing fashion from the Mississippi's banks in a 




Vicksburg, Mississippi. 

loop in the river, made by a long delta, which at high water is nearly submerged. 
The bluffs run back some distance to an elevated plateau. In the upper streets 
are many handsome residences. The Court- House has climbed to the summit 
of a fine series of terraces ; here and there a pretty church serves as a land-mark; 
and the remains of the old fort from which " Whistling Dick," a famous Confed- 
19 



288 



THE 



'NATIONAL CEMETERY AT VICKSBURG. 



erate gun, was wont to sing defiance to the Federals, are still visible on a lofty- 
eminence. From the grass-grown ramparts one can see "Grant's Cut-off" in the 
distance ; overlook the principal avenue — Washington street, well-lined with 
spacious shops and stores, and unhappily filled at all hours with lounging 
negroes ; can see the broad current sweeping round the tongue of land on which 
the towns of De Soto and Delta stand, and the ferries plying to the landings of 
the railroad which cuts across North Louisiana to Shreveport ; can see the almost 
perpendicular streets scaling the bluff from the water-side, and, down by the river, 
masses of elevators and warehouses, whence the white, stately packets come and 
go. There is evidence of growth; neat houses are scattered on hill and in valley 
in every direction; yet the visitor will find that money is scarce, credit is poor, 
and that every tradesman is badly discouraged. 

The river is so intricate in its turnings that one is at first puzzled on seeing a 
steamboat passing, to know whether it is ascending or descending ; at the end of 
the "loop," near the mouth of the Yazoo river, and at the point where Sherman 
made his entrance from the " Valley of Death," is the largest national cemetery 



; 



The National Cemetery at Vicksburg, Mississippi. 

in the country, in whose grassy plats repose the mortal remains of sixteen thou- 
sand soldiers. The view from the slopes of the cemetery, reached by many a 
detour through dusty cuts in the hills, is too flat to be grandiose, but ample 
enough to be inspiring. The wooded point; the cross-current setting around it; 
the wide sweep away toward the bend, are all charming. The old Scotch gar- 
dener and sexton told me that twelve thousand of the graves were marked 
" unknown." The original design contemplated the planting of the cemetery 
with tree-bordered avenues intended to resemble the aisles and nave of a cathe- 
dral. This was impracticable; but oaks have been planted throughout the ground, 
and the graves were covered with lovely blossoms. The section of Vicksburg 
between the cemetery and the town is not unlike the park of the Buttes Chau- 
mont in Paris. Grapes grow wild in the adjacent valleys, and might readily be 
cultivated on the hill-sides. A simple marble shaft in the cemetery is destined to 
commemorate the spot where Grant held his famous interview with Pemberton. 

Vicksburg has acquired a not altogether enviable notoriety as a town where 
shooting at sight is a popular method of vengeance, and, shortly before my 
second visit there, three murders were committed by men who deemed it manly 
to take the law into their own hands. There is still rather too much of this 





DUELING COLONEL VICK. 



289 






barbarism remaining in Mississippi, and it has not always the excuse of intoxica- 
tion to palliate it. The Vicksburg method seems not to be the duel, but cold- 
blooded murder. The laws of the duello are pretty thoroughly expunged in 

Mississippi, although I was not a little 

amused to learn from Governor Ames M _ \ 

that the ultra-Democratic people in .^^~£r' " : ^%t : 4 

those counties of the State border- 
ing on Louisiana refused in any man- 
ner to aid the authorities in securing 
duelists who steal out from New 
Orleans to fight on Mississippi soil, 

on the ground that the " d d 

Yankees want to do away with duel- 
ing so as to make their own heads 
safe." Mississippi is a sparsely settled 
State, and in some of the counties 
life is yet as rough as on the South- 
western frontier. But that open and 









'^W: 



The Gamblers' Graves — Vicksburg, Mississippi. 






deliberate murder should be encouraged in a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants, 

where there is good society, and where church and school flourish, is monstrous ! 

Vicksburg was once the scene of a terrible popular vengeance. A number 

of gamblers persisted in remaining in the town against the wishes of the citizens, 

and having shown fight and killed one 
or two townsmen, they were them- 
selves lynched, and buried among the 
bluffs. The town gets its name from 
one of the oldest and most highly 
respected families in Mississippi, — the 
Vicks, — whose family mansion stands 
on a handsome eminence in the town 
of to-day. Colonel' Vick, the present 
representative of the family, is a speci- 
men of the noble-looking men grown 
in the Mississippi valley, — six feet four 
in stature, erect and stately, with the 
charming courtesy of the old school. 
The picture which our artist has given 
of him does justice only to the fine, 
manly face ; it cannot reproduce the 
form and the manner. Mississippi 
raises noble men, and they were won- 
derful soldiers, showing pluck, persist- 
ence, and grip. Nineteen lines of 
steam-packets ply between New Orleans and Vicksburg, and from Vicksburg 
ud the Yazoo river. The scene in the elevators at the river-side, as in Memphis, 








\ 1 'WIP 

Colonel Vick, of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Planter. 



29O LANDINGS SURREPTITIOUS WHISKEY. 

is in the highest degree animated. Thousands of bales and barrels roll and 
tumble down the gangways which communicate with the boats, and the shouting 
is terrific. The railroad from Vicksburg to Jackson, the Mississippian capital, 
runs through the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the war, crossing the 
Big Black river, and passing Edwards and other flourishing towns, set down 
between charming forests and rich cotton-fields. 

Sailing on through the submerged country from Vicksburg was sorrowful 
work ; every one was depressed with imminent disaster. We passed into the 
great bend, or lake, where, on Hurricane Island, lie the plantations formerly 
owned by the Davis Brothers, — famous for their wealth. The broad acres once 
known as the property of Jefferson Davis are now in the hands of his ex-slave, 
who, by the way, is said to be a miracle of thrift and intelligence. 

Negroes were toiling in the mud at some of the landings, building 
ineffectual dams, around which the current of the great river, sooner or 
later, remorselessly ran. The white men, splashing along the overflowed 
roads on horseback, looked grimly courageous, and ga^e their orders in a 
cool, collected manner. The whole land seemed one treacherous morass; 
the outlook was very discouraging. 

We passed several rude villages on the eastern bank, which had been built by 
colonies of negroes, who had fled as the floods came upon them. These blacks 
gain a precarious livelihood by cutting wood and growing chickens for passing 
steamers; they depend on the captains of the boats for their supplies of corn- 
meal, molasses, pork and whiskey, and are sometimes reduced almost to starva- 
tion when their natural recklessness and improvidence have resulted in empty 
larders. 

At one of these primitive settlements, known as "Waterproof" (it was by no 
means proof against the water, however), there were once two negro preachers 
who were extravagantly fond of whiskey. As each desired to maintain in the 
eyes of the other a reputation for strictest temperance, some secrecy in procuring 
the supplies of the coveted article was necessary, and each made the clerk of the 
" Great Republic" his confidant. Whenever the boat stopped at "Waterproof," 
the preachers were promptly on hand, each one obtaining of the clerk a 
private interview, and imploring him to bring, on the return trip, a good keg 
of whiskey, carefully enveloped, so that " dat udder nigger " should not know 
what it was. When the clerk complied, he received at the hands of the grateful 
preachers thank-offerings of chickens and fat ducklings, and whenever he mis- 
chievously threatened to expose the reverend sinners, he would hear the fright- 
ened words: 

" 'Fo' de Lord, you 's gwine to ruin me !" 

When the river destroys the land upon which the negroes have built a town, 
and tumbles their cabins and their little church into the current, they retire to 
the higher lands, a few miles back, or seek a new water-side location. They 
cultivate but little corn, and give much of their time to merry-makings, " meet- 
ings," mule races, and long journeys from one settlement to another. As we 
passed a little village where there were, perhaps, a hundred negroes, comfort- 



"FREE NIGGERS." 



291 



ably installed in weather-proof cabins, a passenger on the " Great Republic," 
who was a planter of the old regime, indulged in the following monologue : 

" Thar 's what they call free niggers. Thar 's a change from a few years ago, 
sir. Them poor things thar are just idlin' away their time, I reckon ; and you 

notice, they 're mighty ragged and destitute lookin.' Thar 's a d d nigger 

a-ridin' a mule, as comfortable like as ye please. Not much like the old times, 
when they were all working quiet-like in the fields. Sundays yo 'd seen 'em in 
their clean white clothes, singin' and shoutin' or may be doin' a bit of fishin', and 
at night, when the plantation bell rung, agoin' peaceful as lambs to quarters. 
Now it 's all frolic. I reckon they '11 starve. What kin they do alone, sir ?" 




Natchez-under-the-Hill, Mississippi. 

" I hain't nothin' agin a' free nigger," said a tall native of Mississippi bound 
for Texas, " but I don't want him to say a word to me. The world's big enough 
for us both, I reckon. We ain't made to live together under this new style o' 
things. Free niggers and me could n't agree." And the two spat sympa- 
thetically. 

The negroes in the valley cheered the "Great Republic" as she passed; the 
swart mothers, fondling their babes, looked up and waved their hands, and some 
of the men doffed their hats, unconsciously retaining the respectful manner which 
they had been forced to observe under the stern domination of slavery. 

The western bank of the river below Vicksburg, even to the Gulf of Mexico, 
is within the bounds of Louisiana. The eastern bank, to a point nearly oppo- 



2Q2 



CENTURY MAN — NATCHEZ-UNDER -THE- HILL. 







View in Brown's Garden — Natchez, Mississippi. [Page 293. J 



site the Red river, is in Mississippi. The characteristics of the river-side 
populations in both States are much the same. The negroes in many of the 
counties are largely in the majority, and hold responsible offices. One of the 
prominent citizens of Natchez, who was in former days a man of large wealth, 

owning several hundred negroes, was 
sitting on his verandah one day, when a 
negro with a book under his arm ap- 
proached; and with the dignity befitting 
a state official, said to the Caucasian: 
" I 's de century-man, sah ! " 
He was the officer appointed to take 
the census for the county. He could 
not read well, and his chirography was 
painful, but he showed diligence and 
determination. 

Grand Gulf, in Mississippi, is a 
pretty town, lying on romantic hills, 
whose bases are bathed by the great 
stream. A railway extends from Grand Gulf to Port Gibson, eight miles dis- 
tant, and a thriving trade is done with the interior. The hills overhanging the 
river were advantageous positions for the Confederates in war time, and the 
Federal fleet of gun-boats shelled the town and its battery-crowned heights in 
1862. Below Grand Gulf there are no towns of importance on either side of 
the river until Natchez, one of the loveliest of Southern towns, and without 
exception the most beautiful in Mississippi, is reached. 

Natchez, like Vicksburg, lies on a line of bluffs which rear their bold heads 
from the water in an imposing manner. He who sees only Natchez-under-the- 
Hill from a steamboat's deck gets an impression of a few prosaic houses hud- 
dled together not far from a wharf-boat, a road leading up a steep and high hill, 
and here and there masses of foliage. Let him wander ashore, and scale the 
cliff, and he will find himself in a quiet, unostentatious, beautifully shaded town, 
from which, so oppressive at first is the calm, he almost fancies 

" Life and thought are gone away ; " 

but he finds cheeriest of people, — cheery, too, under heavy misfortunes, — and 
homes rich in refinement and half buried under the lustrous and voluptuous 
blossoms which the wonderful climate favors. Natchez has an impressive cathe- 
dral, a fine court-house, a handsome Masonic temple, and hosts of pretty houses. 
You walk beneath the shade of the China-tree and the water oak, the cedar 
and the laurimunda. Nowhere is there glare of sun on the pavement ; nothing 
more clamorous than the galloping of a horse stirs the blood of the nine thou- 
sand inhabitants. 

There were, before the war, great numbers of planters' residences in the 
suburbs, — beautiful houses, with colonnades and verandahs, with rich drawing 
and dining-rooms, furnished in heavy antique style, and gardens modeled after the 



GARDENS — BROWN'S — SHIELDS' NEGRO OFFICIALS. 



293 



finest in Europe. Many of these homes have been destroyed. We visited one or 
two whose owners have been fortunate enough to keep them. The lawns and 
gardens are luxurious. The Mississippian wealth of roses is inconceivable to 
him who has not visited such gardens as Brown's, in Natchez-under-the-Hill, and 
that of Mr, Shields, in the suburbs of the upper town. I remember no palace 
garden in Europe which impressed me so powerfully with the sense of richness 
and exquisite profusion of costly and delicate blooms as Brown's, at Natchez, 
which a wealthy Scotchman cultivated for a quarter of a century, and handed 
down to his family, with injunctions to maintain its splendor. 

From the bluff above this indescribably charming spot one can overlook the 
plain of Concordia, in Louisiana, on the west side the broad, tranquil river, and 
catch the gleam of the lake among the mammoth trees. 

There are still many wealthy families in Natchez, independent of the war and 
its abasements. Here and there a French name and tradition remind one that 
the town is of French origin, that D'Iberville founded it in 1700, and that 
Bienville once had a trading-post there among the Natchez Indians. There 
that tribe, fire-worshipers and noble savages, passed an innocent and Arcadian 
existence, keeping ever alight on their altars a fire in honor of the sun. But the 
white man came ; the fire on the altars went out ; the Indian was swept away. 
Gayarre, who has written well concerning these Southern Indian tribes, says the 
Natchez were the Athenians of Louisiana, as the Choctaws were the Boeotians. A 
hundred years after the Natchez had first seen the French, Fort Rosalie, on 
the bluff, — its site is still pointed out to the stranger, — was evacuated by the 
Spaniards, that the flag of the United States might be raised over it, and 
since 1803 Natchez has been an incorporated American city. It has no manu- 
factures now ; its trade depends entirely on cotton. No railroad reaches it, 
but a narrow-gauge, called the Natchez, Jackson, and Columbus road, has been 
begun. The adjoining counties furnish from five to twenty thousand bales of 
cotton annually, which are shipped to New Orleans for sale. 

Natchez was out of debt when it was given over to the Republican party, but 
has acquired quite a heavy indebtedness since. The negroes came into power 
there in 1867. The present Sheriff, the County Treasurer and Assessor, the 
majority of the magistrates, and all 
the officers managing county affairs, ^/^ 

except one, are negroes. The Board 
of Aldermen has three negroes in it. 
There is the usual complaint among 
the Conservatives that money has been 
dishonestly and foolishly expended; 
but the government of the city 
seemed, on the whole, very satisfac- 
tory. About a thousand children are 
at school in the public schools, and 
four hundred of them, — the colored 

pupils, have a handsome new School- Avenue in Brown's Garden — Natchez, Mississippi. 




294 



MIXED SCHOOLS THE CEMETERY. 



house, called the " Union," built expressly for them. Natchez had an excellent 
system of public schools before the war, and the " Natchez Institute," the 
original free-school, is still kept up. The Catholic institutions are numerous 
and thriving. A good many of the negroes, as in Louisiana, are Catholics. 

One-half of the population of Natchez is black, and seems to live on 
terms of amity with the white half. White and black children play together 
in the streets, and one sometimes feels like asking " Why, if that be so, should 





A Mississippi River Steamer arriving at Natchez in the Night. 



they not go to school together?" But the people of Mississippi, like the people 
throughout the South, will not hear of mixed schools. The negroes are vocifer- 
ously prominent as hackmen, wharfmen, and public servants generally; but they 
do not like to leave the town and settle down to hard work on the worn-out hills 
at the back of the city. 

On the bluffs, some three miles from the town, is a national cemetery, 
beautifully planned and decorated, and between it and Natchez stands the dilapi- 
dated United States Marine Hospital, and the grass-grown ramparts of Fort 
McPherson mark the site of a beautiful mansion which was razed for military 
purposes. When its owner, a rich Frenchman, Avas offered compensation by 
the army officer superintending the work, he gruffly refused it, saying that he 
had enough still left to buy the United States Government. 



TAXATION — A "PARISH JURY" "DAVE YOUNG." 295 

The taxes in Natchez and vicinity are very oppressive, amounting to nearly 
six per cent The State and county tax touches four per cent, and is based on 
full two- thirds the valuation. The railroad movement has, however, done some- 
thing to increase these burdens. 

Many of the Natchez planters own plantations on the Louisiana side of the 
river, but, of course, have no political influence there, and are dependent on the 
negroes for the local legislation necessary to secure them in their rights, and for 
measures to prevent inundation. I attended a session of a parish jury in Vidalia, 
opposite Natchez, and was surprised to find it almost entirely composed of 
blacks. The white planters with whom I conversed grumbled bitterly over 
their hard fate, and recounted thrilling stories of the exploits of carpet-baggers 
in their vicinity. From the tone of their conversation, it was easy to see that 
they believed these carpet-baggers had misled the negroes, who would otherwise 
have been well enough disposed. 

The jury, whose office corresponds, so far as I could learn, very much to that 
of our county commissioners in the Northern States, comprised men of various 
grades of intelligence. One or two of the negroes were well dressed, and quiet 
and gentlemanly in their manners ; the others were slouching, unkempt, suspicious 
in their demeanor, and evidently unfit for any public duty. The planters addressed 
them familiarly, stating their needs, and making hearty appeals to the common 
sense of the most intelligent of the number. As the inundation was rapidly in- 
vading all the neighboring lands, the negroes recognized the necessity of action. 

At Vidalia I also met one of the prominent negro members of the Louisiana 
Legislature, Mr. David Young, a coal black man. When I first saw him he was 
addressing a row of his fellow-citizens, who were seated upon a fence in that 
nerveless, unexpectant attitude so characteristic of the lowland negro. As an 
election was about to occur in Vidalia, he was endeavoring to impress on the 
colored voters the necessity of electing reform officers, and indulged in some 
general remarks on the importance of a purification of Louisiana politics. 
Brandishing his ballots, he warned the listeners to vote for honest representa- 
tives ; whereupon one ragged negro said sullenly : 

" I 's done gwine to vote to suit myself. Dave Young nor no udder man 
ain't gwine to tell me nothin' 'bout my vote." 

Mr. Young then proceeded to explain to them that Northern sentiment 
was beginning to rebel against the misrule at the South, and that the colored 
voters throughout the State must be "wise in time." The listeners shook their 
heads suspiciously, although evidently impressed with what they had heard. As 
we drew near, and entered into conversation, Mr. Young turned his attention to 
us, and expressed himself desirous of a fair government in the State for both 
whites and blacks. While he gave his views, in plain but well chosen language, 
I noticed that the other negroes listened intently, making whispered comments 
on his remarks. They were far from friendly toward Young, as he was a candi- 
date for re-election to the Legislature against a white man who had a notoriously 
evil reputation as a carpet-bagger, yet who had obtained the firm support of a 
majority of the negroes in the parish. 



296 



SETTER THAN A CARPET-BAGGER. 



"We do not object," said one planter to me, as we left Vidalia, "to the 
presence of the negro in the parish jury, we complain because nine out of ten 
who sit upon the jury are ignorant and have no property at all, and yet are 
permitted to judge of what -is best for the interests of property- holders. We are 
often compelled to submit questions of vital importance to the judgment of irre- 
sponsible and suspicious fellows, who, because they are opposed to us politically, 
seem to think it their bounden duty to do nothing for our material well-being. 
But such men as Dave Young do some good. They are teaching the negroes 
a little prudence and moderation. I would rather have a nigger like David, than 
a white man like " (mentioning the wicked carpet-bagger). 




"Sah?* 



XXXI. 

LIFE ON COTTON PLANTATIONS. 

jURING my stay in Natchez, one of the many gentlemen interested in 
cotton-planting on the west or Louisiana side of the river, invited 
me to accompany him on a tour of inspection. The rapidly-rising river threat- 
ened to inundate the lands on which hundreds of negroes had been expending 
weeks of patient care, and the planter felt it his duty to take a horseback ride 
over the trio of plantations under his charge ; so we crossed the Mississippi, and 
rode twelve miles into the interior of Louisiana. 

On the road, which led along the lovely banks of Lake Concordia, the planter 
chatted of some of the vexations by which he is daily beset, and spoke rather 
hopelessly of the labor problem. The condition of society, too, he thought very 
bad, and that it was an actual hindrance to the development of the section. 

"Are the negroes," I asked him, "aggressive and insolent toward the white 
people?" 

But as the planter was about to answer this question, we approached a ferry- 
boat, or barge, in which we were to cross an arm of the lake to the island on 
which my friend's plantations were situated. An old negro man, much the worse 
for liquor, was preparing to monopolize the boat with his mule-team, but held 
back the mules, and touched his hat with drunken courtesy as we came up. 

"Stand aside, uncle," said the planter firmly, but very politely; " we wish to 
cross at once, and there is not room for us all." 

"Yas, sah ; yas, Colonel," said the old man. " I 's willin' to wait on you 
gemmen, 'cause you is gemmen ; but ef yer was no count folks, I 'd go for yer. 
Ride in, Colonel." 

When we were some distance from shore, the planter said : 

" That old man made way for us simply out of deference to our social 
position. The negroes are courteous enough to us ; it has been their habit so 
long that they cannot forget it. But they will kill our deer and steal our poultry 
and bacon, and we have no redress." 

After an hour or two of journeying over rough roads, we came to one of the 
plantations. A host of negroes were busily filling a breach in a dyke which the 
treacherous water might sweep away if rains came to swell the already ominous 
floods of the Mississippi. A pack of hounds came yelping to meet the planter ; 
and the black women in the cabin courtesied obsequiously. 

We crossed the field, bordered by noble cypresses and oaks, stopping 
now and then to watch the negroes as they carefully prepared the ground 
which an inundation might, in less than a day, reduce to a hopeless wilderness 



298 THE OVERSEER — COTTO N - PL AN TING. 

of mud. Entering the house of the overseer, we found that functionary smoking 
his pipe and reposing after a long ride over the plantation. He was a rough, 
hearty, good-natured man, accustomed to living alone and faring rudely. I 
asked him what he thought of the negro as a free laborer. 

" He works well, mostly, sir. These yer Alabama niggers that 's workin' on 
our plantations now do well on wages. They make some little improvements 
around their cabins, but mighty little, sir. Ef politics would only let 'em alone, 
they 'd get along well enough, I reckon." 

"Do the negroes on this plantation vote?" 

" I reckon not (laughing). I don't want my niggers to have anything to do 
with politics. They can't vote as long as they stay with us, and these Alabama 
boys don't take no interest in the elections here." 

" What do they receive as monthly wages?" 
"From ten to sixteen dollars. It costs us about fifteen dollars per head to bring 
'em from Alabama. These niggers likes wages better than shares. We keep a 
store here, and, Saturday nights, most of the money they have earned comes 
back to us in trade. They 're fond o' whiskey and good things to eat." 

" What is the routine of your work on a large plantation like this, and those 
adjoining it, throughout the year ? " 

" Wal, sir, I reckon that 's a long story. We don't have much spare time, 
and mighty little amusement. Wal, sir, the first thing we do, sir, we begin early 
in January, a few weeks after the old crop is all gathered in, to repair fences and 
clean out all the ditches, sir. Then we pull down the old stalks, and start the 
ploughs to throw quadruple furrows in the fields. Then we throw out the 
'middles.' " 

"What are they?" 

" Wal, sir, we throw out soil at the sides so as to leave a slope bed of fresh 
ground to plant on, and loose earth to cover it with. If the spring freshet 
breaks on to this yer prepared earth, we 've got to begin over again, and that 
makes the season very late. 

" Planting begins about the last of March, or very early in April. Piles of 
cotton seed are laid along some ways apart on the field, and then the niggers 
sow it along the beds, a ton of seed to eight acres. Then it is 'barred off' — 
covered up, that means. 

" Ez soon as the cotton stalks begin to peep up, 'scraping' begins. The 
hands weed every row carefully, and don't leave any weakly plants. That, and 
looking after the caterpillars, keeps 'em busy till July. Caterpillars ain't the only 
danger we have to fight against. Thar 's a hundred others. Cotton 's a ticklish 
plant to raise. You 've got to watch it mighty close, and then the worms and 
the weather will sometimes ruin the crop. 

" Between July and September we keep the hands busy, getting out baskets, 
and setting things in order ; then we pile in new help, and for the rest of 
the season, employ three times as many hands as thar 's in the fields now. 
Up to Christmas it 's picking and ginning, and it 's right lively, you can be 
sure." 



COTTON PLANTATION NEGROES. 299 

From the overseer's conversation I learned that cotton-picking is done quite 
as thoroughly under the system of free labor as in the days when slave-driving 
was permissible ; but that the " niggers " require constant watching. On many 
plantations where the yield is abundant, it is difficult to concentrate labor enough 
at the proper time to get the cotton into the gin-house the same year that it is 
planted. I have seen cotton-fields still white with their creamy fleeces late in 
December, because the negroes were either too lazy or too busily engaged in 
their annual merry-makings to gather the harvest. But on the large lowland 
plantations along the Mississippi, the crop is usually gathered early, and the 
picking is very thorough. I could not discover that there was any system of 
"forced labor" now in use, and I thought the overseer's statement, that a "good 
field-hand now-a-days would pick 250 pounds of cotton daily," was excellent 
testimony in favor of free labor. He added, however, that on many plantations 
the average hands would not pick more than 100 pounds per day. 

The laborers were coming in from the field in a long picturesque procession. 
As it was spring-time many of them had been ploughing, and were mounted 
upon the backs of the stout mules which had been their companions all day. 
Some of the men were singing rude songs, others were shouting boisterously and 
scuffling as they went their way along the broad pathway bordered by giant 
cypresses and noble oaks. The boys tumbling and wriggling in the grass per- 
petually exploded into guffaws of contagious laughter. Many of the men were 
tall and finely formed. They, had an intelligent look, and were evidently not 
so degraded as those born on the Louisiana lowlands. The overseer sat on the 
veranda of his house, now and then calling out a sharp command or a caution, 
the negroes looking up obsequiously and touching their hats as they heard his 
voice. When the mules were stabled the men came lounging back to the cabins, 
where the women were preparing their homely supper, and an hour afterward 
we heard the tinkle of banjos, the pattering of feet and uproarious laughter. 
The interiors of the negro cabins were of the rudest description. The wretched 
huts in which the workmen live seem to them quite comfortable, however. I 
saw, no one who appeared discontented with his surroundings. Few of these 
laborers could read at all. Even those who had some knowledge of the alphabet 
did not seem to be improving it 

Late in the evening, as the planter, with his heavy cloak thrown about his 
shoulders, was reposing from the fatigues of a wearisome ride over the broad 
acres, a delegation of field-hands came to see him, all to ask favors of " de 
Cunnel," — to get him to write a few letters, or to bring some tiny parcel from 
the town on his next visit to the plantation. The men came huddling in, bowing 
awkwardly, and stood with their caps in their hands as near the door as possible, 
as if ready to run on the slightest provocation. If I looked at them steadily 
they burst into uneasy laughter and moved away, while the black women in the 
door-way and on the porch re-echoed the merriment. Meantime the planter 
listened to one after another of the delegation. Charles, a black boy, six feet 
tall, and with sinews strong as steel, stepped forward to the flickering light given 
by the candles and the burning logs in the fire-place. 



300 "THE LIKELIEST NEGRO." 

" Cunnel, I wish you read me dat letter, please, sah." 

The " Cunnel " read it, Charles meantime standing erect, with his great arms 
folded across his mighty chest and the massive column of his throat throbbing 
with scornful emotion. There was a strange, baffled expression in his face ; a 
look of contempt for his own helplessness which was painful. 

The letter was common-place enough, reproaching Charles for having left 
Alabama before liquidating the pressing claims of certain swarthy creditors. 
Having, after some trouble, deciphered the letter's meaning, the Colonel said, 
gently but coldly : 

" Stand aside, Charles. Andy, who is the likeliest negro from Alabama now 
on the plantation?" 

No answer for a minute. Andy stepped forward into the light, looking first 
into the fire-place, then at the deer's horns over the mantel, then at the shining 
revolver on the rough wooden table, while his immense lips worked nervously, as 
if endeavoring to draw in inspiration from the air. 

"Did you hear me, Andy?" 

" Cunnel, I 's a studyin', sah." 

After having studied some time, Andy darted out without a word, and 
presently returned with three hulking black giants, who huddled together in the 
same helpless way that the first arrivals did. They held their shapeless felt hats 
in their enormous hands, glancing from them into the faces of the white men ; 
then exchanging significant looks with each other, burst into the regulation 
laugh. 

" Did the colored politicians try to keep you from leaving Alabama to come 
here with me, boys?" inquired the Colonel. 

Intense surprise on the part of the negroes. 

" No, sah ; reckon not, sah." 

" Did you vote in Alabama?" 

" Yas, Cunnel; yas, sah, always voted, sah." 

" Can you do better here than in Alabama?" 

After mature reflection, the trio responded in the affirmative. 

"Would you care to vote here?" 

Hesitatingly, "No, sah;" whereupon the three negroes were dismissed 'into 
the darkness. 

The Alabama papers at the beginning of the current year reported that the 
colored laborers were leaving that State in troops of thousands. They were nearly 
all en roitte for the cotton plantations of Mississippi, and on the Louisiana bank 
of the Father of Waters. Central Alabama appeared at that time to be under- 
going rapid depopulation for the benefit of the richer lands along the Mississippi 
bottom. It was estimated in the spring of 1874 that Alabama had already 
lost from $700,000 to $1,000,000 in her labor element alone. How long the 
influx of the freedmen into Mississippi and Louisiana from the South Atlantic 
States and from Alabama will continue is uncertain. In 1873 Georgia lost fully 
20,000 of her able-bodied colored laborers, and gained but little in white immi- 
gration to balance it. 



WAGES FOOD ROUTINE. 3OI 

The women and children on the cotton plantations near the Mississippi river 
do not work in the fields as much as they used. Rude as are their surroundings 
in the little cabins which they now call their own, they are beginning to take an 
interest in their homes, and the children spend some time each year at school. 
The laborers on the plantations in Louisiana have sometimes been paid as high 
as thirty dollars per month, and furnished with a cabin, food, and a plot of 
ground for a garden ; but this is exceptional. 

While supper was being prepared the master of the plantation apologized for 
what he modestly called the homely fare which, he said, was all that he could set 
before us. 

"We are so far from town here," he said, "that we can offer you only plan- 
tation fare — rough meat and eggs, with bacon, a loaf of baker's bread, and 
some bottles of claret which I brought from Vidalia." 

I ventured to suggest that on the plantation he had every facility for a 
superb garden, and to wonder that the overseers did not employ some of the 
negroes to cultivate a plot of ground that its fruits might appear on the table. 

"Oh, oh," laughed the overseer. "Make a garden here; reckon it would 
have to have a mighty high wall ; the niggers would steal everything in it as 
fast as it was ripe." 

But I suggested that if each of the negroes had a small garden, which he 
seemed to have ample time after hours to cultivate, he would not desire to steal. 

The Colonel smiled gravely, and the overseer shook his head incredulously, 
adding : 

"These is good niggers, but stealing is as natural as eating to them;" and, 
with this remark, we were ushered into the supper- room, where two black servant 
girls ran nimbly about, bringing in plain but substantial fare, which our hard 
riding made thoroughly palatable. 

There was no white lady on the plantation. The overseer and his two assist- 
ants were busy from dawn till dark, and when night threw its shadows over the 
great cypress-bordered aisles of the forest and the wide expanse of the fields, 
they dismissed the negroes about the store and the stables and retired to rest. 
But on the occasion of our visit we saw unusual activity. A violent storm arose 
while we were at supper, and the overseers mounted their horses and rode off 
in different directions to inspect the levees. Troops of negroes were dispatched 
in skiffs along the lake with hundreds of sacks, which they were instructed to 
fill with sand and place at weak points on the levees. All night they fought 
the slowly but steadily-rising waters, while my companion and I slept on a mat- 
tress on the floor of the overseer's room, undisturbed by anything save the sighing 
of the winds through the noble trees surrounding the house, and. the clatter of 
rain upon the shingles. 

With early morning back came the Colonel, pale and worn with a night of 
battle with the steadily- rising water, and, as he laid aside his heavy cloak, placed 
his revolver on the table, and sat down with a Aveary sigh, he said it was hardly 
worth while to try to be a successful cotton-planter now-a-days ; things human 
and things divine seemed to conspire to make it impossible to succeed. I 



30Z 



A RAINY DAY ON THE PLANTATION. 



thought of his sigh and of his helpless look a day or two afterward, when I was 
told that one thousand acres of his plantation had been flooded and badly injured 
by the offensive policy of a neighbor planter, who had cut the Colonel's levees 
to save his own. 

With daylight also, although the rain was steadily falling, the plantation 
blossomed into, activity. The overseers had arisen long before the dim streaks 
of the dawn were seen on the lowland horizon ; had galloped over many a 
broad acre, but returned gloomily, announcing that the land was too wet to work 
that day. The negroes slouchingly disposed themselves about the store and the 
overseer's " mansion," keeping at a respectful distance from the kitchen, where 
sat the overseer himself, surrounded by his dogs. Nothing more dispiriting 
could be imagined than the atmosphere of this lowland plantation over which 
imminent disaster seemed breaking. From right and left came stories of trouble 
and affliction. Here and there a planter had made a good crop and had laid 




A Cotton Wagon -Train. 

aside a little money, but the evidences of material prosperity were painfully 
few. The overseers, while doggedly persistent in working the plantations up 
to their full capacity, still seemed to have a grim sense of a fate which over- 
hung the whole locality, and which would not permit consecutive years of pros- 
perity and plenty. 

There is still much on one of these remote and isolated plantations to recall 
the romance which surrounded them during the days of slavery. The tall and 
stalwart women, with their luxuriant wool carefully wrapped in gayly-colored 
handkerchiefs; the picturesque and tattered children, who have not the slightest 
particle of education, and who have not been reached even since the era of re- 
construction, by the influences of schools and teachers; the groups of venerable 
darkeys, with their gray slouch hats and impossible garments, who chatter for 
hours together on the sunny side of some out-buildings, and the merry-makings 
at night, all recall a period which, the planter will tell you, with a mournful look, 
comprised the halcyon days of Louisiana. 



CHARACTER OF THE NEGROES. 3°3 

The thing which struck me as most astonishing here, in the cotton-lands, as on 
the rice plantations of South Carolina, was the absolute subjection of the negro. 
Those with whom I talked would not directly express any idea. They gave 
a shuffling and grimacing assent to whatever was suggested ; or, if they dis- 
sented, would beg to be excused from differing verbally, and seemed to be much 
distressed at being required to express their opinions openly. Of course, having 
the most absolute political liberty, because in that section they were so largely 
in the majority, numerically, that no intimidation could have been practiced, it 
seemed astonishing that they should be willing to forego the right to vote, 
and to willingly isolate themselves from their fellows. I could not discover 
that any of the negroes were making a definite progress, either manifested by a 
subscription to some newspaper or by a tendency to discussion ; and, while 
the planter gave me the fullest and freest account of the social status of the 
nsgroes employed by him, he failed to mention any sign of a definite and in- 
tellectual growth. The only really encouraging sign in their social life was the 
tendency to create for themselves homes, and now and then to cultivate the land 
about them. 

The rain continued to fall in torrents as we rode across the island along the 
muddy roads, under the great arches of the cypress-trees, on our return to 
Natchez. Here and there a few negroes were desperately striving afield, 
endeavoring to effect something in spite of the storm ; but the planter shook 
his head gravely, and said that all agricultural operations must now be two 
months later than usual. The lack of concerted operations among the planters 
against the inroads of the floods, and the disastrous consequences of an incom- 
petent labor system, were, to his thinking, effectual drawbacks to much material 
progress for a long time. In a previous chapter I have shown how the produc- 
tion of Concordia parish has fallen off since slavery was abolished ; and he could 
not give any encouragement to my hope that this wretched state of affairs would 
soon be changed. 

At last we reached the arm of the lake where we expected to find our sable 
ferry-man, but the rain had washed the waters into quite a fury, and we could 
see neither ferry-man nor barge. Half-an-hour's hallooing at last brought the 
old man from his cabin on the opposite side, and another half hour brought him, 
dripping wet, with the gray wool of his beard glistening with rain-drops, to the 
shore on which we stood. He complained bitterly of his poverty, yet I was 
surprised to learn that each time the Colonel visited his plantation he paid this 
venerable boatman a dollar for his ride across the lake. Although I diligently 
endeavored to enter into conversation with the aged black man, he steadily 
avoided any reference to political topics, and assumed a look of blank amaze- 
ment when I appealed to him for a direct opinion. But he was always civil, 
courteous to a degree not discoverable among people in his rank of life in the 
North. His character swayed and bent before any aggression, but did not 
break ; it was as stubborn as elastic. 

In the forest through which ran the road leading to the Colonel's plantation, 
we met a brown man mounted on a stout horse, and loaded down with a 
20 



304 



A POACHER LOCAL RIVER PACKETS. 



small armory of fire-arms, in addition to which he carried a long knife and a 
hatchet, evidently intended for dissecting some deer. 

" Ha !" said the Colonel pleasantly, yet with a touch of annoyance in his voice, 

" so you are going poaching on my land again ? There will soon be no deer left." 

"Yas, Cunnel," said the fellow, impudently shifting his long rifle from his 

right to his left shoulder. " I reckon ef I see any deer I 's gwine to go for 'em, 

sho ;" then, putting spurs to his steed, he galloped off. 

There was no redress, and the Colonel was compelled to submit anew to the 
plundering of his preserves. 

Driving homeward with my artist companion, the Colonel having left us to 
return to his fight with the levees, we were struck with the picturesque clusters 
of negro cabins by the wayside. Nowhere else in the agricultural regions of 
the South had we perceived such a tendency to an artistic grouping of buildings. 
Along the road, which was now so covered with water that we could hardly pick 
our way, a few uproarious negroes, with whiskey bottles protruding from their 
pockets, were picking their dubious way. As we approached they saluted us, 
touching their hats with sudden dignity. Everywhere in this lowland region we 
found the negro courteous more from habit than from desire. Even when he fell 
into the sullen silence which marks his supremest dissent, he was deferential and 
polite to a degree which made that silence all the more exasperating. I have 
never in my life seen a more gracious and civil personage than the weather- 
stained and tattered old negro who stood on a shelving bank by the lake-side, 
and carefully pointed out to us the best spots in the submerged road, as we 
drove through the little village of which he was an inhabitant. 

s ,_ The local river packets, 

which depend mainly upon 
the commerce of the cotton 
plantations between Vicks- 
burg and New Orleans, are 
the only means which the 
planters possess of commu- 
nication with the outer 
world. The arrivals of the 
" Robert E. Lee," or of the 
"Natchez," at the planta- 
tion landings, always furnish 
picturesque and interesting 
scenes. We had occasion 
to journey from Natchez to 
Vicksburg, departing from 
the former town late at 
night The negro hackman who was to transport us from the upper town to 
Natchez-under- the- Hill for the moderate sum of three dollars, bade us remain 
quietly in our rooms until " de Lee whistled." So, toward midnight, hearing 
the three hoarse yells from the colossal steam-pipes of the Robert E. Lee, we 









A Cotton - Steame: . 



A STEAMER CABIN — TALKS WITH PLANTERS. 305 

were hurried down to the great wharf-boat, where we found a motley crowd of 
negro men and women, of sickly, ague-stricken, poor whites, and smartly-dressed 
planters, whose immaculate linen and rich garments betrayed but little of the 
poverty and anxiety now afflicting the whole section. 

Presently, out of the gloom which shrouded the great river, a giant shape 
seemed slowly approaching, and while we were endeavoring to discover what it 
might be, flaring pine torches sent forth an intense light which disclosed the great 
packet, with her forward deck crowded with negro roustabouts, whose faces shone 
as the flame was reflected upon them. The tall pipes sent out sparks and smoke, 
and the river-monster, which seemed stealthily drawing near to us to devour us, 
winked its fiery eyes and sleepily drew up at the wharf, where, with infinite 
trouble, it was made fast with many stout ropes, while the mates screamed and 
cursed as only Mississippi boatmen can. 

The cabin of one of these steamers presents quite a different aspect from 
those of the Northern packets which come from St. Louis and Cincinnati. The 
bar is a conspicuous object as one enters, and around it cluster eager groups 
busily discussing the latest phase of the Kellogg usurpation, or, in such times of 
depression and disaster as during my visit, lamenting their fate with a philosophic 
air doubtless somewhat enhanced by the soothing nature of the liquids imbibed. 

As the traveler goes to register his name and purchase his ticket, the obliging 
clerk hands him the latest file of the New Orleans papers, of which hundreds of 
copies are given away at all the ports where the packets stop. No planter along 
the line thinks of buying a newspaper, but depends on the clerk of the steamer, 
who willingly furnishes him the news of the day. 

About the card-tables men are busily absorbed in the intricacies of " poker" 
and "seven-up," and the talk is of cotton and of corn, of the rise and fall of the 
river, and reminiscences of adventures in forest and on stream during the "waw." 
On the "Robert E. Lee" I found a number of prominent young cotton-planters, 
all of whom were complaining of the effects of the inundation. Many of these 
planters were educated gentlemen, familiar with life at the North, and with the 
best society. None of them were especially bitter or partisan in their views ; 
their material interests seemed to command their immediate attention, and they, 
as others throughout the cotton country of the South, complained of the seem- 
ing impossibility of reorganizing labor upon a fair and proper basis. All were 
unanimous in their testimony as to the superiority of free over slave labor, but 
all asserted that it was attended with so many drawbacks and vexations that they 
feared it would end in the promotion of much distress, and in the ruin of hundreds 
of planters. They, however, were by no means confronted with the worst 
aspects of the labor question, since labor was flowing to them, and not receding 
from them, as from the planters in Central Alabama, and in certain portions of 
Mississippi. 

Mr. Robert Somers, in his excellent observations on the labor question, as 
viewed in Alabama, made during a journey throughout the Southern States in 
1870-71, hits upon some truths with regard to the relations of the planter and 
freedman, in the following manner : 



306 THE SHARE SYSTEM. 

" What the planters are disposed to complain of is, that while they have lost 
their slaves, they have not got free laborers in any sense common either in the 
Northern States or in Europe. One cannot but think that the New England 
manufacturer and the Old England farmer must, be equally astonished at a 
recital of the relations of land, capital and labor, as they exist on the cotton 
plantations of the Southern States. The wages of the negroes, if such a term 
can be applied to a mode of remuneration so unusual and anomalous, consist, 
as I have often indicated, of one-half the crop of corn and cotton, the only crops 
in reality produced. 

"The negro on the semi-communistic basis thus established finds his own 
rations ; but, as these are supplied to him by the planter or the planter's notes 
of credit on the merchants, and as much more sometimes as he thinks he 
needs by the merchants on his own credit, from the 1st of January onward 
throughout the year, in anticipation of crops which are not marketable until 
the end of December, he can lose nothing by the failures or deficient out- 
come of the crops, and is always sure of his subsistence. As a permanent 
economic relation, this would be startling anywhere betwixt any classes of men 
brought together in the business of life. Applied to agriculture, in any other 
part of the world, it would be deemed outrageously absurd, but this is only a 
part of the 'privileges' (a much more accurate term than 'wages') of the negro 
field-hand. In addition to half the crops, he has a free cottage of the kind he 
seems to like, and the windows of which he or his wife persistently nail up ; he 
has abundance of wood from the planter's estate for fuel, and for building his 
corn-cribs and other out- houses, with teams to draw it from the forest. He is 
allowed to keep hogs and milch cows and young cattle, which roam and feed 
with the same right of pasture as the hogs and cattle of the planter, free of all 
charge. Though entitled to one-half the crops, he is not required to contribute 
any portion of the seed, nor is he called upon to pay any part of the taxes on 
the plantation. The only direct tax on the negroes is a poll tax." Mr. Somers 
declares that he found this tax " everywhere in arrear, and, in some places, in a 
helpless chaos of non-payment. Yet," he adds, " while thus freed from the 
burden of taxation, the negro has, up to this period of reconstruction, enjoyed 
the monopoly of representation, and has had all legislative and executive power 
moulded to his will by Governors, Senators and Deputies, who have been either 
his tools, or of whom he himself has been the dupe. For five years," he con- 
cludes, "the negroes have been kings, lords and commoners, and something 
more, in the Southern States." 

"But to come back," continues Mr. Somers, "to the economic condition of 
the plantations, the negro field-hand, with his right of half-crop and privileges as 
described, who works with ordinary diligence, looking only to his own pocket, 
and gets his crops forward and gathered in due time, is at liberty to go to other 
plantations and pick cotton, in doing which he may make from two to two and a- 
half dollars a day. For every piece of work outside the crop that he does even 
on his own plantation, he must be paid a dollar a day. While the land owner is 
busy keeping account betwixt himself and his negro hands, ginning their cotton 



OBSERVATIONS ON PLANTATION LABOR. 



307 



for them, doing all the marketing of produce and supplies, of which they have 
the lion's share, and has hardly a day he can call his own, the hands may be 
earning a dollar a day from him for work which is quite as much theirs as his. 
Yet the negroes, with all their superabounding privilege on the cotton-field, 
make little of it. A ploughman or a herd in the Old World would not exchange 
his lot for theirs, as it stands and as it appears in all external circumstances." 

I have quoted these excellent remarks, as they afford a glimpse into some of 
the causes of the discouragement which prevails among large numbers of cotton- 
planters. 

Nothing can be more beautiful than the appearance of a cotton-field, extend- 
ing over many hundreds of acres, when the snowy globes of wool are ready for 




bcene on a Cotton rlnntati 



picking, and the swart laborers, with sacks suspended from their shoulders, 
wander between the rows of plants, culling the fleeces. The cotton-plant is 
beautiful from the moment when the minute leaflets appear above the moist earth 
until the time when it is gathered in. In June, when it is in bloom and when 
the blossoms change their color day by day, a cotton plantation looks like an 
immense flower garden. In the morning the blooms of upland cotton are often 
of a pale straw color ; at noon of a pure white ; in the afternoon perhaps 
faint pink, and the next morning perfect pink. It is noticed, however, that the 
blossom of the sea-island cotton always remains a pale yellow. When the flow- 
ers fall away, and the young bolls begin to grow, the careful negroes watch for 
the insidious approach of the cotton-worms, terrible enemies to plantation 
prosperity. There are many kinds of these worms ; they multiply with astonish- 



308 THE GROWING COTTON THE COTTON-WORM. 

ing rapidity, and sometimes cut off the entire crop of whole districts. Their 
presence cannot be accounted for, although elaborate investigations into the cause 
of their appearance have been undertaken ever since 1800, when they first 
appeared in the South. There is a popular belief that they come at intervals of 
three years in the same districts, and that their greatest ravages occur after inter- 
vals of twenty -one years. Their appetites are exclusively confined to cotton, of 
which they devour both the long and the short staples greedily. 

The planters build fires in the fields when they perceive that the insects are 
about to visit their crops, hoping to attract and destroy the moths which are the 
parents of the worms ; but in many cases this proves insufficient. When the 
cotton- worm appears early in the season there are usually three broods. If the 
fires are built exactly at the time of the appearance of the first moths, then their 
speedy destruction, preventing the appearance of the second and third broods, 
aids in limiting the ravages; but the remedies are rarely undertaken in time. 
The ally of this vicious destroyer of the planter's fondest hopes is the boll- worm 
moth, a tawny creature who in the summer and autumn evenings hovers over 
the cotton-blooms and deposits a single egg in each flower. In three or four days 
this egg is hatched, and out of it comes a worm who voraciously eats his way 
into the centre of the boll, and then, ere it falls to the ground, seeks another, in 
which he in like manner buries himself. In Central Alabama, in 1873, we 
were told that plantations were so devastated by worms that they seemed 
as if lightning had passed over them and scathed them. The bolls were, in 
many cases, cut down for entire acres as completely as if the reaper's sickle 
had been thrust into them. 

During picking season in the States of North and South Carolina, Georgia, 
Northern Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, the southern half of 
Arkansas and the eastern half of Texas, plantation life is busy and merry. If 
the planter has made a good crop, he calls in multitudes of negroes from the 
surrounding country to help him pick. These laborers sometimes wander from 
plantation to plantation, like the hop-pickers in the West; but where labor is not 
scarce, an extra force for a few days is all that is required. 

By the middle of October the season is at its height. Each person is 
expected to pick two or three hundred pounds of cotton daily, and as fast as the 
fleeces are picked they are carried either in wagons or in baskets, on the heads 
of negroes, to the gin-house. There, if the cotton is damp, it is dried in the 
sun, and then the fibre is separated from the seed, to which it is quite firmly 
attached. 

Nothing can be simpler or more effective than the machinery of the ordinary 
Whitney cotton-gin. Its main cylinder, upon which is set a series of circular 
saws, is brought into contact with a mass of cotton separated from the cylinder 
by steel bars or gratings. The teeth of the saws, playing between these bars, 
catch the cotton and draw it through, leaving the seeds behind. Underneath the 
saws a set of stiff brushes, revolving on another cylinder moving in an opposite 
direction, brushes off from the saw-teeth the lint which was taken from the seed, 
and a revolving fan, producing a rapid current of air, throws the light lint to a 



"ginning" cotton 



309 



convenient distance from the gin. The ginning of sea-island cotton is practiced in 
South Carolina and Georgia, and requires the use of two fluted rollers, commonly 
made of wood, but sometimes of vulcanized rubber or steel, placed parallel in a 
frame which keeps them almost in contact. These rollers revolve in opposite 
directions, and draw the cotton between them, while the seeds, owing to the lack 
of space, do not pass through. 

Horse power is' ordinarily used on small plantations in ginning cotton, while 
the great planters employ steam. But now a host of enterprising individuals 
have set up gin-houses in neighborhoods central to many plantations, and to 
them flock the many whites and blacks who cultivate one or two acres in cotton. 
The gins in these houses are usually run by steam, and many a man has made a 
small fortune in two or three years since the war by preparing the cotton brought 
to him from the country round about. Fires are frequent in these gin-houses, 





-^S.f?DAV'~ r 



Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 



and sometimes the freedmen revenge themselves upon their ex- masters by send- 
ing their expensive machinery heavenward in a blaze. Such malice as this, 
however, is not common, although there are some instances of planters who have 
lost many thousands of dollars by the torch of the incendiary. 

After the cotton leaves the gin it passes to the press, where it is packed into 
bales. On small plantations these presses are worked by hand or by horse 
power, while on the great and finer ones hydraulic presses are common. On 
well-ordered lands the picking is, of course, over before Christmas, and the 
planters and laborers alike give themselves up to the jollity of holidays; but, as 
I have already mentioned, the sight of acres of unpicked cotton in January and 
February in some parts of the South is not at all uncommon. It is the most 
effectual proof of the complete disorganization of the labor system. 

One of the peculiar vexations which the planter suffers is the constant steal- 
ing of cotton by the negroes during picking time. They manage to abstract it 
in petty quantities ; and after having accumulated a little stock, they take it, if 



3io 



THE RED RIVER RAFT. 



they live in the vicinity of a city, to what is known as a "dead fall house," where 
a clever "fence," or receiver of stolen goods, buys unquestioningly whatever 
they bring. If they live in some remote section, they boldly carry the cotton 
to the local merchant, who receives it in barter, very likely before the eyes of 
the planter from whom it was stolen, and who knows that he has no practical 
redress. Most of the negroes on the plantations have not the strong sense of 
honor which should lead them to consider their employers' interests as their own, 
and many of the merchants encourage them in their thievish propensities. 

Sixty-five miles below Natchez the Red river empties into the Mississippi. 
The recent improvements made by the General Government upon this river, 




The Red River Raft as it Was. 

under the direction of the Board of Engineers, in the removal of the raft of 
drift-wood, have given it new commercial possibilities. The raft, which was 
thirty miles long, had, for many years, rendered navigation north of Shreveport 
impossible. The sketch, which the kindness of one of the engineers who had 
been employed in the removal of obstructions placed at the disposal of our 
artist, will serve to show what the Red river raft was. The river runs through 
one of the finest cotton regions in the country, and, in its ample and fertile 
valley, immense quantities of cotton and sugar, grain and tobacco will, in future, 
be produced*. Not only Louisiana, but Arkansas and Texas, have been directly 
benefited by the improvement of the stream. 



XXXII. 

MISSISSIPPI — ITS TOWNS — FINANCES — SCHOOLS. 
PLANTATION DIFFICULTIES. 

MISSISSIPPI and Alabama together form a mighty domain ; many an empire 
has been founded upon a less extent of territory than either contains. 
Both States have suffered a good deal from evils incident to reconstruction ; both, 
I believe, are destined to a recuperation soon to come, and to a wealth and posi- 
tion such as neither, in the palmy days of slavery, dreamed of. Alabama, with 
her million of inhabitants, and Mississippi, with her nine hundred thousand, seem, 
to an European or Northern visitor, almost uninhabited. In each State there is 
still an immense tract of native forest. The railway lines, almost as numerous in 
Mississippi as in Alabama, run for scores of miles through woods and uncleared 
or unreclaimed lands. The slave-holders naturally sought out the best land to 
mass their negroes upon, and now the freedmen are settled there, rudely try- 
ing to work out the problem of self- government, a problem extremely difficult 
for the wisest community to solve, and, of course, utterly beyond the scope of a 
horde of newly emancipated negroes. There has been a marvelous widening 
and heightening of sentiment in each State, and something of national feeling is 
now manifested in both. A little money and consequent independence would 
enable the capable people to do a great deal, despite the encumbrance of the 
incapables. Mississippi has no minerals from which to predict a future growth ; 
but her splendid soil grows cotton superbly, and Indian corn, tobacco, hemp, 
flax, silk, as well as all kinds of grains and grasses. At one end of the State 
the apple flourishes ; at the other, one may luxuriate in orange groves and under 
the shade of the fig-tree. The sixty counties in Mississippi contain farms and 
plantations whose cash value, in 1870, was nearly $100,000,000. The rivers run 
south-west, to pay tribute to the mighty stream from which the State takes its 
name — save a few in the eastern section, which flow into the Alabama rivers, 
and thence reach the Gulf of Mexico. Property has fallen ruinously in both 
Alabama and Mississippi; the former boasted, in i860, a valuation in real estate 
and personal property, of nearly $450,000,000; in 1870, $155,000,000. Missis-, 
sippi, at the outbreak of the war, had a valuation of $509,472,912 ; and in 1870, 
$154,535,527. The cotton production of Mississippi fell from 1,202,507 bales in 
i860, to 564,938 bales in 1870; and the wealthy planter vanished before the 
storm of revolution. 

Corinth, in Mississippi, with its memories of terrible battles, is at the junction 
of the Memphis and Charleston railroad with the Mobile and ,Ohio. There 
Beauregard once sat haughtily entrenched until Halleck's persistence in assault 




i tf 
KANSAS ! 



INDIAN TER. 






M r*-/*\mm. 




COTTON . 

Compiled from 9th.Censua. 



Russell & Struthers.N.Y. 



MAP SHOWING THE COTTON REGION OF THE UNITED STATES. 



312 CORINTH — MERIDIAN. 

drove him away ; and there occurred that ghastly encounter between Rosecrans 
and Van Dorn, which looms up, like a hideous vision, through the battle-smoke 
of our recent history. The land was as thoroughly camped upon as any in 
Virginia, and to-day the tracks of the contending armies are still visible, in the 
devastated timber and waste lands. There is good soil thereabouts. Located 
on so important a line as the Memphis and Charleston, Corinth is gradually 
gaining, and a few thousand bales of cotton annually go to market from its 
vicinity. A cotton and woolen manufacturing company, an extensive enterprise, 
with large capital, has been started near by. Pushing down the Mobile and 
Ohio railroad to Meridian, past renaissant Okalona, which received such a terrible 
shattering during the war; past tiny towns and villages where cotton bales, small 
wooden houses, and the depot, are the principal features ; along the rich prairie 
lands, world-famous ; over the pine slopes — one comes upon the rich wood- 
lands which fringe the country in which Meridian stands. From Okalona a 
branch line runs off to the new and thriving town of Aberdeen ; from both 
towns and their neighborhood large quantities of cotton are annually sent 
to market. 

Meridian, Mississippi, a new town in the woods, yet pretty withal, is the 
southern terminus of the Alabama and Chattanooga railroad, which runs through 
Birmingham, in Alabama, to Chattanooga, in Eastern Tennessee. At the time 
of my journey along the line from Birmingham northward, the road was in 
the anomalous condition into which Southern railways sometimes get; a condition 
in which no one knows, or scarcely considers it worth while to inquire, who 
owns it, so hopeless is the embarrassment. No tickets were to be had at the 
depot ; I was informed that it was uncertain whether there would be any 
train that night. "Reckoned the conductor ('captain,' my informant called 
him) was running the train, and making what he could of it." But the line 
is a remarkably fine one, and as soon as population comes in to support it, 
will be one of the great routes of the South. It passes, on its way north- 
ward, through Eutaw, Alabama, pretty in its bowers of shade trees; along the 
fertile prairies, with their underlayers of limestone; and crosses the Tombigbee 
river at a point where the whitish limestone bluffs are ranged in rows, form- 
ing high banks, as picturesque and imposing as the walls of an ancient temple. 
Here once was great wealth, and here toiled thousands of slaves. Now they have 
vanished; so has the wealth, and the planter is left behind to worry along as 
best he can. Tuscaloosa, named after a valiant Indian chief of Alabama's early 
history, was for many years the capital of the State, and is the site of the State 
Lunatic Asylum, a United States land office, and many flourishing schools. 
The State University, already alluded to, has a group of handsome buildings 
on a commanding eminence not far from the banks of the Black Warrior river. 
Few students frequent it now, though there is some hope that it may be 
revivified as Alabama grows prosperous once more. Situated on the borders 
of both the agricultural and mineral region of the State, Tuscaloosa has 
always been interested in the mining of both the iron and the coal abundant 
near by, and the Kennedale cotton-mill, near the town, has been in prosperous 



FRENCH IMPERIALISTS RAILROAD CONNECTIONS. 



313 



operation since 1868. The Black Warrior* is a fine stream, and serves as a high- 
way for the transportation of coal and iron to Demopolis, and thence via the 
Tombigbee toward the Gulf. Demopolis was settled in 18 18 by a colony of 
French imperialists whose devotion to Napoleon the First had compelled them to 
fly from France. Among them were many noted soldiers and ladies of the 
fallen Emperor's court. Many afterward returned to France, and but few of 
their descendants at present remain in Alabama. 

Scattered over the fifty-five thousand square miles which make up the State 
of Mississippi, there are but half-a-dozen towns of considerable size. It can 
readily support on its thirty-five millions of acres a dozen millions of people. 
Vicksburg, Natchez, Jackson, and Columbus are the principal towns ; the rest are 
villages, into which the trade created by the surrounding country has crowded. 





The Mississippi State Capitol at Jackson. 

All the good lands are very accessible ; railroads run in every direction through 
the State. The Vicksburg and Meridian route runs from Meridian through Jack- 
son to the Mississippi river ; the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern gives 
the capital easy communication with New Orleans ' and via the Mississippi 
Central, which runs from Jackson to Grenada, and from Grenada through Holly 
Springs and Oxford to the Tennessee line, sends a current of Northern trade and 
travel through the State. Columbus, Mississippi, is an enterprising town on the 
Tombigbee river, in the centre of a rich planting region, and depends mainly for 
its support upon the shipment of cotton to Mobile. Vicksburg and Natchez 
have already been described in their relations to the Mississippi river and the 

* Tusca-loosee — meaning Black Warrior — was the Choctaw term for the river, and the 
town took its name from it. 



3H 



THE MISSISSIPPI CAPITOL PUBLIC BUILDINGS. 



country which contributes to their trade ; it remains, therefore, to give some idea 
of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi. 

First of all, Jackson is very pretty — a quiet, unambitious village of five or six 
thousand inhabitants, on the banks of the Pearl river, a charming stream, which 
makes its erratic way through lovely forests and thickets, and whose current is 
strewn with the drift-wood torn from them. At Jackson one begins to feel the ripe- 
ness and perfection of the far South; he is only twelve hours from New Orleans, 
and sees in the gardens the same lustrous magnificence of blossom which so 
charmed his eye in the Louisiana metropolis. The evenings are wonderfully 
beautiful, silent, impressive. Reaching Jackson from Vicksburg at dark, I strolled 
along the half-mile of street between the hotel and the business centre of the 
town; there was no stir — no sound; one might as well have been in a wood. 
At last, encountering a mule-car, whose only occupant was the negro driver, I 
returned in it to the hotel, where I found that every one but the watchful 
clerk had retired. 

The State Capitol, a solid and not unhandsome building, the Penitentiary, 
the Insane Asylum, the Land Office, a fine Governor's residence, and the 
Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb and Blind, compose Jackson's public buildings, 
all well built and commodious. At the proper seasons, one sees in the long main 
street of the town, lines of emigrant wagons, filled with hard-featured men and 
women bound for Texas or "Arkansaw." These Ishmaels are not looked upon 
with any especial love by the inhabitants who intend to remain in their native 
State, and are often the subjects of much satire, which they bear good-humoredly. 
Hebrew names appeared to predominate on the signs; the Jews monopolize most 
of the trade; negroes lounge everywhere, and there are large numbers of smartly 



iMm '. a 



I 

I 





"At the proper seasons, one sees in the long main street of the town, lines of emigrant wagons." 

dressed mulattoes, or sometimes full blacks, who flit here and there with that con- 
scious air which distinguishes the freedman. I wish here to avow, however, that 
those of the negroes in office, with whom I came in contact in Mississippi, 



NEGRO OFFICIALS GOVERNOR AMES. 315 

impressed me much more powerfully as worthy, intelligent, and likely to progress, 
than many whom I saw elsewhere in the South. There are some who are 
exceedingly capable, and none of those immediately attached to the Government 
at Jackson are incapable. In the Legislature there are now and then negroes 
who are ignorant ; but of late both branches have been freer from this curse than 
have those of Louisiana or South Carolina. 

A visit to the Capitol showed me that the negroes, who form considerably 
more than half the population of Mississippi, had certainly secured a fair share of 
the offices. Colored men act as officials or assistants in the offices of the 
Auditor, the Secretary of State, the Public Library, the Commissioner of Emi- 
gration, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The Secretary of State, 
who has some negro blood in his veins, is the natural son of a well-known Mis- 
sissippian of the old regime, formerly engaged in the politics of his State ; and 
the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the last session was a black man. 
The blacks who went and came from the Governor's office seemed very intelligent, 
and some of them entered into general conversation in an interesting manner. 

The present Governor, ex- United States Senator Adelbert Ames, was four 
years Military Governor of Mississippi, and knows the temper of both whites and 
blacks in the State very well. To his military regime succeeded the Government 
of Mr. Alcorn, now United States Senator from Mississippi, and when Mr. Alcorn 
was sent to the Senate, Lieutenant-Governor Powers took his place. Alcorn, 
returning from the Senate last year, contested the Governor's chair with Ames, 
but, not succeeding in a re-election, returned to Washington. At the outset 
of Governor Ames' civil administration, which began recently, he affirmed his 
determination to redeem the Republican party in that section from the charge of 
corruption, and the Legislature has taken measures to second his laudable resolve. 

Mississippi's State debt is but little — some three millions ; she was fortunate 
enough not to have any credit in the markets of the world when reconstruction 
began, and therefore escaped a good many financial dangers. Her repudiation 
of her honest indebtedness, years ago, did her infinite harm, and it would be 
wise to take up that debt, and pay it in future. Part of the money at present 
owed by the State is due the schools. The State tax is not large ; it is the city 
and county taxation which is oppressive, but that is mainly because of the 
straitened circumstances of the people. 

The vicious system of issuing State warrants has been for some time pursued, 
but a bill was passed at the last legislative session, funding all these warrants ; 
which had the effect of bringing them up at once from sixty to eighty cents. A 
new law also requires that all taxes be paid in greenbacks. The State paper has, 
at times since reconstruction, been sold on the street in Jackson at forty per cent, 
below par. The return to a cash basis will, it is estimated, save twenty-five per 
cent, in the cost of government alone. A general movement in favor of 
"retrenchment and reform" on the part of the dominant party is manifest, the 
natural result of which will be the restoration of the State's credit. Governor 
Ames is firm in his measures, and is not surrounded, to judge from a brief look 
at them, with men who are inclined to misuse their opportunities. 



3 l6 PROGRESS OF EDUCATION NEWSPAPERS. 

The State Superintendent of Education informed me that there are about 
75,000 children now in attendance upon the State schools, fully 50,000 of whom 
are colored. He believed that there was at the time of my visit $1,000,000 
worth of school property owned in the State, which proved a great advance since 
the war. In counties mainly' Democratic in sentiment, there is formidable oppo- 
sition to anything like a public school system, but in those where Republican or 
negro officials dominate, schools are readily kept open and fully attended. The 
Superintendent said that he had in only one case endeavored to insist upon 
mixed schools, and that was in a county where the white teachers had refused 
to teach negro scholars. He had found it necessary to inform those teachers 
that, in that case, they must not attempt to keep the black children from the 
white schools, since he was determined that they should receive instruction. 

The school fund is quite large ; there are normal schools at Holly Springs 
and Tougaloo; and the blacks have founded a university named after Ex- Gov- 
ernor and Senator Alcorn. It occupies the site of the old Oakland College near 
Rodney, on the Mississippi river, and receives an annual appropriation of 
$50,000. 

A successful university has also been in operation in Tougaloo for several 
years. First-class teachers for the public schools are very much needed. Large 
numbers of very good private schools are maintained in the State by those 
citizens who still disbelieve in free public tuition. 

The University of Mississippi,* at Oxford, an old and well managed institu- 
tion, exclusively patronized by whites, receives, as does Alcorn University, an 
annual subsidy of $50,000 from the State, and its average attendance is fully 
equal to that before the war. It has been properly fostered and nourished 
by the Republican Government, and the motley adventurers in South Carolina 
might learn a lesson in justice and impartiality from the party in power in 
Mississippi. 

As soon as the funds devoted by the State to educational purposes are paid 
in greenbacks, or, in other words, when the evil system of " warrants " is 
thoroughly extinct, Mississippi will make sterling progress in education, and, in 
proportion, will grow in thrift, wealth and importance. 

Jackson has two flourishing newspapers, The Pilot being the Republican, and 
The Clarion the Democratic organ. Socially, the town has always been one of 
high rank in the South, although some of the rougher Mississippian element has 
at times been manifest in that section. The residence once occupied by Mr. 
Yerger, who killed the military Mayor of Jackson, shortly after the close of the 
war, because that Mayor had insisted upon the collection of certain taxes, is still 
pointed out to visitors. There are many charming drives in the town; a little 
beyond it, the roads are rough and the country is wild. A garrison is main- 
tained at Jackson, and now and then the intervention of United States authority 
is necessary to quell disturbances in interior districts. 

The State has made efforts to secure immigration, but, like many other 
Southern commonwealths, finds it impossible to compete with the North-west, 
* Both this and Alcorn University have agricultural departments. 



SOURCES OF WEALTH COMMERCIAL FACILITIES. ^\J 

and becomes discouraged in presence of the objections made by white laborers to 
settling within its boundaries. The south-western portion presents really fine 
inducements for the cultivation of cotton, corn, tobacco, sugar-cane, peaches, 
pears, apples, and grapes. In several of these south-western counties the yield of 
sugar has been one thousand pounds to the acre. The average yield of cotton is 
a bale to the acre. Fruit culture could be made a paying specialty throughout 
that part of the State. 

The rich stores of pine, pecan, hickory, oak, walnut, elm, ash, and cypress 
timber form also an element of future wealth. Those lands fronting upon the 
Gulf of Mexico offer, in orange orchards and the miraculous oyster-beds along 
the shores, rare prizes for the emigrants who will go and take them. The counties 
a little remote from the coast are rich in a luxuriant growth of pine, and there 
too, the culture of sugar and the grape has already been successful. 

The stock- grazier, also, can find his paradise there ; and there the ample 
water power of the Pearl, the Wolf, the Pascagoula, the Escalaufa, the Leaf and 
the Chickasawha rivers can turn the largest mills. The average price of lands 
in the State, accepting the testimony of the Government immigration agent, is 
five dollars per acre. 

Life and property are probably as safe at present as in any other State 
in the South. The reputation of Southern Mississippi has not heretofore 
been of the best in respect to law and order; but the State seems to be 
now entering upon an epoch of peace and confirmed decency. Mississippi has, 
undoubtedly, suffered immensely, in a material point of view, since the close 
of the war, but is now on the road to an upbuilding, and would spring into 
astonishing growth if the vexed labor question could only be settled in some 
manner. 

An immigration to the Mississippi sea-board, where there is so much magnifi- 
cent timber, would be peculiarly advantageous to young men possessed of small 
capital. Pascagoula river and its tributaries give a water line thirteen hundred 
miles in extent through a dense timber region. Millions of feet of good lum- 
ber are now shipped from this section. The improvement of the harbor and 
the deepening of the channel at Pascagoula, and the elevation of that place and 
of Bay St. Louis into ports of entry, would greatly increase the trade of Missis- 
sippi in that direction. 

The people of the State have also long desired the connection of the Gulf 
coast with the central interior, by a railway line, and will demand it soon. Until 
it is accomplished Mississippi will, perforce, pour streams of commerce into 
Mobile and New Orleans, while her own grand harbors remain unimproved and 
empty. Meantime, the completion of the network gradually covering the State 
goes on ; and the Memphis and Selma, the Mobile and North-western, the 
Vicksburg and Memphis, the Vicksburg and Nashville, the Prentice and Bogue 
Phalia, and the Natchez, Jackson and Columbus roads are projected, and, in 
some cases, the routes have been partially graded. 

The Vicksburg and Nashville road has no very powerful reason for existence, 
as its projected line is intersected at equidistant intervals by three rich and 

2i 



3 i8 



UNIMPROVED CONDITION OF THE STATE.- 



powerful lines in successful operation ; and there has been a good deal of opposi- 
tion to the surrendering to that road of the trust funds known as the three per 
cents., and the agricultural land scrip, amounting in all to some $320,000. 

Along the line of rail from Jackson to New Orleans there is much growth of 
substantial character. Mr. H. E. McComb, of Wilmington, Delaware, has built up 
a flourishing town not far from the Louisiana line, and named it McComb City. 
But the country is still mainly in a wild state, and one cannot help feeling, while 

borne along in the palace-car through 
forests and tangled thickets, that he is 
gradually leaving the civilized world 
behind. He imagining each village 
which he sees, like an island in the 
ocean of foliage, to be the last, and 
experiences a profound astonishment 
when he comes upon the cultivated 
and European surroundings of New 
Orleans. Northward, along the rail- 
way lines, it is much the same. 

All one day we traversed the line 
from Jackson to Memphis, coming to 
but two towns of any mentionable size 
in the whole distance. The others 
were merely groupings of a few un- 
painted houses built against the hill- 
sides, among the trees, and on the 
open plains. 

Plantation life is much the same 
in all sections of the State, although 
the methods of culture and the amount 
of results may differ. The white man 
and the negro are alike indifferent to 
a safe and steady provision for the future by growing their own supplies. 

The planters are nearly all poor, and very much in need of ready money, 
for which they have to pay exorbitant rates of interest. At the end of a year 
of pretty hard work, — for the cotton planter by no means rests upon a bed of 
roses,_ — both whites and blacks find themselves little better off than when they 
began, and feel sore and discouraged. The negroes migrate to Louisiana and 
Texas in search of paying labor, while the planters complain very generally 
of the scarcity of help. 




V/ . 

"The negroes migrate to Louisiana and Texas in search 
of paying labor." 



^^S^- 



XXXIII. 

MOBILE, THE CHIEF CITY OF ALABAMA. 

THERE was a delicious after-glow over sky and land and water as I left New 
Orleans for Mobile one warm evening in March, the month which, in the 
South, is so radiant of sunshine and prodigal of flowers. 

Nothing in lowland scenery could be more picturesque than that afforded by 
the ride from New Orleans to Mobile, over the Mobile and Texas railroad, which 
stretches along 'the Gulf line of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. It runs 
through savannahs and brakes, skirts the borders of grand forests, offers here a 
glimpse of a lake and there a peep at the blue waters of the noble Gulf; now 
clambers over miles of trestle-work, as at Bay St. Louis, Biloxi (the old fortress 
of Bienville's time) and Pascagoula ; and now plunges into the very heart of 
pine woods, where the foresters are busily building little towns and felling giant 
trees, and where the revivifying aroma of the forest is mingled with the fresh 
breezes from the sea. 

The wonderful charm of the after-glow grew and strengthened as the train 
was whirled rapidly forward. We came to a point from which I saw the broad 
expanse of water beneath the draw-bridge over the Rigolets, and the white sails 




On the Bay Road, near Mobile, Alabama. [Page 321.] 



hovering far away, like monster sea-gulls, on either side the railroad. The illu- 
sion was almost perfect ; I seemed at sea. Along the channel I could see the 
schooners, and now and then a steamer, coming from the deep canals that run 



320 



ON THE ROAD TO MOBILE. 



from New Orleans to Lake Pontchartrain, and communicate with Lake Borgne. 
At a little pine-built village, completely shrouded in foliage, and seemingly lulled 
to sleep by the murmurous song of the birds and drowsy hum of the insects, a 
party of roystering negro men and women, carrying banjos and guitars on their 
shoulders, left the forward car. Suddenly my next neighbor said : 

" Did you see that white man thar, 'mong the niggers, with a beaver on, 'long 
o' that big black wench ?" 

" Do you really think he was a white man ? " 

"Yes, d n him; p'r'aps his heart's black, though. Looks like that big 

nigger was his wife." 

Then the voice grumbled itself away into silence. 

This somewhat deadened the romance with which I was beginning to invest 
the journey — for the mystical twilight creeping on, the strange panorama of 
vegetation flitting before my eyes, the sudden transition from forest to Gulf shore, 
and the sombre calm of the horizon where blue wave seemed mutely kissing 
bluer sky, all combined to throw one into delightful musings. I retired to the 
platform of the Pullman car, and was once more giving way to the spell of the 
sunset, when a sharp voice behind me said : 




"Mobile bay lay spread out before me." [Page 321.] 

"Cap'n, can't you set inside, 'n let us shet the do'? The mosquitoes is gitting 
so they bite powerful sharp." 

Then darkness came treacherously and suddenly, as it does in that strange 
Southern land ; and we rolled rapidly through the edge of Mississippi ; past 
the pretty Gulfside towns, whither beauty and fashion fly in spring and sum- 
mer ; past inlet, across river, and turned landward to Mobile. 

The lovely bay on which the chief city of Alabama is located extends thirty 
miles inland to the mouth of the Alabama river. One of the most charming 
promenades near Mobile lies on the bay shore. Bowling merrily over the shell 
road one superb March day, I was impressed with the tranquil beauty of the 



THE ROAD NEAR MOBILE BAY. 



321 



spot. There was a light haze ; Mobile bay lay spread out before me, a dimly 
seen vision, the foreground dotted with masses of drift-wood brought in by the 
tide, and with the long piers running out to pretty bathing-houses. 

There was a strange and sleepy air of quiet about the place ; a tropical luxu- 
riance of sunlight and blossom, so curiously at variance with one's preconceived 
notions of March, that it was a 
perpetual puzzle ! A gentle breeze 
blew steadily inland ; it seemed 
perfume-laden. The tide was com- 
ing in. Here and there we had 
glimpses of long beaches as fine 
in their rounded sweep as Castella- 
mare, and massive magnolias, sixty 
or seventy feet high, threw noble 
shadows over the sheeny water, 
from which the haze gradually 
lifted. Vines, water oaks, and 
pines tall enough for the masts 
of Vikings' ships, bordered the 
way. Neat residences peered from 
rose-smothered gardens; a negro 
woman fished silently in a little 
pool made by the tide, never 
catching any fish, and seemingly 
content to regard the reflections of 
her own ebony face in the water ; 
a swart farmer lazily followed the 
mule-drawn plough afield ; urchins tumbled among the snags and drift-wood 
hauled up to dry ; and goats and kids lingered and skipped distrustfully on the 
knolls by the roadside. 

Here was a garden filled with arbors and benches in cozy nooks; in its centre, 
a latticed cafe, whose proprietor was opening soda bottles, and, barearmed, dis- 
pensing cooling drinks to customers sprawling on seats, with their faces raised to 
catch the inspiring breath of the sea. There was no whir of gilded equipages ; 
the long avenue seemed all my own ; I could almost fancy that the coast was 
mine, the islands and the light-houses were mine, and that the two negro 
hunters, loitering by with guns on their shoulders, were my gamekeepers, come 
to attend me to the chase. The delicate hint of infinity on the mingled wave 
and haze-horizon ; the memories of siege and battle awakened by the sight of the 
dim line of Blakely coast ; the penetrating perfume wafted from magnolias and 
pines; the soul- clarifying radiance of the sunshine, which industriously drove 
away the light mist, all conspired to surround me with an enchantment not dis- 
pelled until I had once more gained the streets of the town. 

We are indebted to Bienville, that prince of colonial guardians, for Mobile, as 
well as for New Orleans. He it was who, in 171 1, built the defense called Fort 




"A negro woman fished silently in a little pool." 



322 



MOBILE, PAST AND PRESENT. 



Conde, on the present site of the town, and who gave the name of Mobile to the 
bay, because the Indians inhabiting that section called themselves Mobilians. 
On the west side of the bay he at one time erected a fort called " St. Louis de la 
Mobile." For half a century the present city was only a frontier military post, 
carrying on a small trade with the Indians. It was French in character and 
sentiment, and although but few of the Gallic characteristics are now perceptible 
in the manners of any of its inhabitants, there are hints of the departed French 
in the architecture and arrangement of the town. It fell into British hands in 
1763, by the treaty of Paris between Great Britain and France, and was too 
remote from the other colonies to succeed in doing anything against British rule 
during the American Revolution. 

After the British came the Spaniards, who drove out the former, and partially 
burned Mobile during the siege. In due time, as tract after tract was wrested 
from the Indians, the territory of Mississippi was formed, with Winthrop Sargent 
of Massachusetts as Governor, and to this Government Mobile and its tributary 
country were accountable, after the departure of the Spaniards, until the 
thorough subjugation of the savage, and his expulsion from the Tennessee valley, 
and from his hunting grounds on the Chattahoochee, had opened the whole 
domain to the white man, and a portion of Mississippi territory was organized in 
March of 18 17, under the name of "Alabama." By 18 19, white settlers had 
flocked into the country in such numbers that Alabama was admitted to the 
Union. 

Mobile is to-day a pretty town of 35,000 inhabitants, tranquil and free from 
commercial bustle, for it has not been as prosperous as many of its southern sea- 
port sisters. Government street, its principal residence avenue, has many fine 

mansions situated upon it; the gar- 
dens are luxuriant, and give evidence 
of a highly cultivated taste. Superb 
oak-trees shade that noble street, as 
well as the public square between Dau- 
phin and St. Francis streets. The 
streets and shops are large, and many 
are elegant ; but there is no activity ; 
the town is as still as one of those 
ancient fishing villages on the Massa- 
chusetts coast when the fishermen are 
away. Yet there is a large movement 
of cotton through Mobile yearly. A 
cotton exchange has grown up there 
within the last two years, and when I 
visited it, already had 100 members. 
The Custom -House— Mobile, Alabama. Mobile annually receives and dispatches 

from 325,000 to 350,000 bales of cotton, most of which comes from Mississippi, 
much of whose carrying trade she controls. Some of the cotton brought to 
Mobile goes eastward, but the mass of it goes to the foreign shipping in the 







THE HARBOR OF MOBILE THE CITY'S COTTON TRADE. 



323 



■"lower bay." The port needs many improvements, and the Government has 
for some time been engaged in a kind of desultory dredging out there, but 
has not yet succeeded in affording a sufficient depth of water to allow large 
vessels to corrie directly to the wharves ; and the lines of artificial obstruction, 
built across the channel of the bay during the war, to impede the passage of 
vessels, have not yet been removed. 

In due time, with a revival of commerce and the development of the immense 
resources in cotton, coal and iron in the State, the channel through the bay will 
be properly deepened, and Mobile will have a wharf line along its whole front. 
At present, however, it seems that foreign captains rather prefer to have their 
ships loaded from small crafts which come twenty or twenty-five miles down the 
bay with the cotton, as they thus avoid port dues and the danger of desertion of 
sailors. It costs but twenty cents per bale to convey the cotton down the 
harbor, and the captains, anxious to 
get their lading and depart, have 
none of the customary port delays 
and exactions to complain of. In 
1867-68, Mobile exported 358,745 
bales; in 1868-69, but 247,348; in 
1869-70, sent away 298,523; in 
1870-71, the number rose to 417,508; 
but in 1871-72, fell again to 295,629; 
and in 1872-73 was over 300,000. 
Of this cotton the greater portion was 
sent directly to Liverpool, the amount 
going northward yearly varying from 
80,000 to 160,000 bales. Down the 
Alabama river, from the rich but 
lately unfortunate country around 
Montgomery and Selma, come thou- 
sands of bales on the light- draft 
steamers ; and the river banks form one continuous line of cotton plantations. 
Nearly 400 vessels, employing 7,500 sailors, and having a tonnage of 275,000 
tons, are annually employed in direct commerce with the port. This cotton 
movement does not, however, make Mobile either especially rich or active 
as a town, inasmuch as, aside from a few manufactories of minor importance, it 
constitutes the sole business. 

The railroad connections of the city are excellent, and her citizens are anxious 
to improve them still farther. The New Orleans, Mobile and Texas line gives 
direct communication with New Orleans and Brashear City, the point of depart- 
ure of the Morgan steamships for Texas ; the Mobile and Ohio road connects 
Mobile with Columbus in Mississippi ; the Mobile and Montgomery gives it a 
highway to the State capital, and thence via the South and North Alabama road 
through the wonderful mineral region, to Decatur and Nashville. It is intended 
to create a road from Mobile to Tallahassee in Florida, in due time, and the city 




Bank of Mobile and Odd Fellows' Hall — Mobile, Alabama. 



324 



PENSACOLA POSSIBLE ANNEXATION. 



already has connection with Pensacola, the most important of the northern 
Florida ports. All that section of the " land of flowers " contiguous to Alabama 
will doubtless be annexed sooner or later ; there is a growing sentiment in both 

States in favor of annexation. The pres- 
ent route to Pensacola from Mobile is 
roundabout ; one has to make a trian- 
gular detour from Mobile to Pollard, 
on the Montgomery road, and thence 
return coastward on the Pensacola and 
Louisville route. At present the only 
connection which Pensacola has with 
Eastern Florida is via steamers to St. 
Mark's, and thence by rail across the 
peninsula to Jacksonville. Pensacola 
has one of the most remarkable harbor^ 
in the world; it is thirty miles long, 
from six to eight wide, and nearly 
thirty- five feet deep. The average 
depth on the bar at the harbor entrance 




The Marine and City Hospitals — Mobile, Alabama. 



is twenty-four feet. Any ship, however heavily loaded, can readily approach 
Pensacola at any season of the year, and can reach the open sea in a couple of 
hours. The harbor is safe — differing in that respect from many of the Florida 
ports, and is amply defended by three 
forts in good condition. A naval sta- 
tion, and boasting a marine hospital 
and a custom-house, Pensacola, with 
its four thousand inhabitants, already 
talks grandly of its great future. The 
immense quantities of fine timber 
which grow in lower Alabama and 
upper Florida furnish the city with 
an extensive lumber trade. The com- 
pletion of the North and South rail- 
road gives it also almost an air line to 
Nashville and Louisville, and promises 
to make it in future one of the outlets, 
like Brunswick on the South Atlantic 
coast, for the trade of the West* 

The Mobile and Montgomery 
road has done much for Mobile, plac- Trinit y Church -Mobile, Alabama. 

ing the town upon one of the main lines of travel across the country. Two 
excellent bridges span the Mobile and Tensaw rivers; the old and tedious transfer 

* In 1872, eight hundred foreign ships entered Pensacola harbor, and probably a thousand 
come there yearly. Few come save in ballast, their object being to procure outward freights of 
cotton and lumber. 




RAILROADS — MANUFACTORIES — A SHIP CANAL. 



325 



by boats is done away ; and to-day a stream of freight and travel passes through 
the city from North to South, bringing with it visitors and investors. The pro- 
jected "Grand Trunk" railroad has not yet made much progress. It is intended 
to give an additional route from Mobile to the mineral regions, and its completion 
would develop a large 



S 



A 



\MJ 



tw 



££?.'. . <<f? 




In the City Park, Mobile 



th their lovers." 



section of valuable coun- 
try. It will stretch four 
hundred miles into the in- 
terior, making new trade 
for Mobile, but it is not 
likely to be built at once. 
•It has been completed to 
Jackson, fifty-nine miles 
from Mobile. 

Mobile does not rank 
as high, as a commercial 
city, as in the palmy 
days gone by ; but the 
peculiar advantages of 
her location, and the vast 
resources of the State 
whose chief seaport she 
is, can but bring her a good future. At present her banking capital is small, 
hardly aggregating a million and three-quarters, and outside rates for money are 
ruinously high. There is a large and increasing capital concentrated in fire and 
life insurance companies; the manufactories are all of minor importance, except 
the Creole and the Mobile cotton-seed oil works. Alabama produces nearly 
three hundred thousand tons of cotton-seed annually, of which fully one-half can 
be spared for sale. There is a similar prosperous factory at Selma. This industry 
may attain large proportions. Mobile has made active efforts to become one of 
the principal coffee markets of the Union, and claims that direct importation from 
Rio to Mobile is easier, less expensive, and more direct than to New Orleans. 
The retail trade of the city has been greatly injured by the establishment through- 
out the State of a vast number of new stores, where the freedmen on the adjacent 
plantations now purchase the supplies which they once bought in bulk in 
Mobile. There is some hope that the city may become the coaling station for 
the steam navigation of the Gulf. The Cedar Keys and Florida railroad is the 
medium of shipping much cotton and other produce directly to New York 
from Mobile, which would have been diverted elsewhere were it not for this 
advantageous route. 

The construction of the proposed ship canal across Florida would be very bene- 
ficial to Mobile, in affording her a cheap water-way, while the South Atlantic ports 
must necessarily be restricted in growth by expensive railroad transportation. 

My visit to Mobile was in spring-time, when the whole land was covered with 
blossoms. The City park is filled with noble trees, in whose shade ebony nurse- 



326 



SPRING HILL SOUVENIRS OF MOBILE BAY. 




maids flirt with their lovers and squirrels frolic with the children. The drive 
along the quiet and secluded by-way to "Spring Hill" reminded one of the 
rich bloom and greenness of England, save that here and there were semi- 
tropical blossoms. Climbing to 
the roof of the Jesuit, college on 
' Spring Hill, I looked out over a 
lovely plain, once studded with 
beautiful homes, many of which 
have now fallen sadly into decay. 
A dense growth of forest still 
shrouds much of the surrounding 
country ; in the distance the faint 
line of the Gulf seemed a silver 
thread. Along the hills, over 
which I wandered, flourished all 
the trees peculiar to the far South, 
and the Scuppernong grape grew 
magnificently in the college vine- 
yards. The fresh and aromatic 
atmosphere of the woods, mingled 

In the City Park, Mobile- 'Squirrels frolic with the children." ^^ ^ ddicate breath from the 

sea, made it difficult for one to fancy that pestilence could ever spread its wings 
above Mobile. Yet there, as elsewhere, from time to time the death angel 
inaugurates his terrible campaign, and the citizens are compelled to flee to the 
mountains. 

Mobile bay is replete with historic interest. One may perhaps think, in look- 
ing out over its placid waters, of Iberville's colonists coming, in 1799, a motley 
and sea-stained gang, to land on Dauphin's Island, and finding there so many 
human bones, that they called it 
Massacre Island ; but one cannot 
forget the mighty naval battle when 
grim old Commander Farragut forced 
his way past the fire of Fort Morgan 
and Fort Gaines, whose Confederate 
guns were at all hazards to be silenced. 
One cannot remember, without a thrill, 
how one day the squadron, which had 
hung steadfastly at the mouth of the 
bay during three long years of war, 
transformed itself into a fiery antago- 
nist — a war-fleet, breathing forth fire 
and destruction ; nor how, after the 
admiral had fought his way with his 
fleet past the forts into the harbor, the 
giant ram, the "Tennessee," the pride Barton Academy— Mobile, Alabama. 




ALABAMA CELEBRITIES MASKERS PUBLIC 



UILDINGS, 



327 



and glory of the Alabamians who built her, stood out to meet her formidable 
foes, although she had seen the decks of all her other Confederate consorts 
transformed into slaughter-pens. One cannot forget how, even after the harbor 
was taken, and closed against the blockade-runners, the little city held valiantly 
out another twelve months, until the attack by Canby on the defenses along the 
eastern shore was crowned with victory, until the Spanish Fort and Blakely, Bat- 
teries Hager and Tracy were invested, besieged and taken. 

Mobile is the home of some Southern celebrities ; among them are Admiral 
Semmes, who lives peaceably and handsomely, following the profession of law; 
Madame Octavia Walton Le Vert, Augusta J. Evans, authoress of "Beulah" 
and one or two other ultra- scholastic novels, and General John Forsyth, ex- 
diplomat, and one of the ablest jour- 
nalists in the country. The Register, 
which General Forsyth edits, is some- 
times a little bitter in partisan politics, 
but altogether highly creditable to 
Mobile. The city is also famous for 
having inaugurated the masked secret 
societies, which have lately become 
such a feature of the Southern carnival, 
and which for several years held the 
field with the "Cowbellions" and the 
"Strikers," whose representations were 
always looked forward to with pleas- 
ure by the citizens of the Gulf coast. 
The Cowbellions, the Strikers, and 
the "T. D. A's," are New Year's Eve 
societies ; and among the Mardi-Gras 
companies are the " Order of Myths," 
and the " H. S. S." Not even the war and the depression of commerce have 
been able to deaden the jollity of the genial maskers. 

The home of many lovely women, Mobile has a thoroughly good society, 
cultivated and frank, and the assemblages of its citizens are as brilliant gatherings 
as are to be found in the country. There are no public buildings of special 
beauty; the Custom- House, the Odd Fellows' and Temperance Halls, the 
Catholic Cathedral, the First Presbyterian and Christ Churches, Mobile Col- 
lege, the Academy, the Bank of Mobile, are all pleasing structures, but devoid 
of any remarkable features. Both Catholics and Protestants have well-con- 
ducted orphan asylums ; in the numerous public schools the white and black 
children are pretty well provided for, education making progress as grati- 
fying in the city as it is meagre and discouraging in the country. Immigration 
and manufactures would make of Mobile one of the most attractive of Southern 
towns; it needs but a little aid to establish itself firmly and handsomely. The 
cemetery is somewhat dilapidated, yet filled with pretty monuments and those 
sweetest memorials of the dead — a profusion of delicious flowers. 




Christ Church — Mob 



XXXIV. 

THE RESOURCES OF ALABAMA — VISITS TO MONTGOMERY 

AND SELMA. 

THAT which chiefly astonishes the stranger in visiting Alabama is that the 
superb material resources of the State should have remained undevel- 
oped so long. He is told that, in a little less than a century, Alabama expended 
two hundred millions of dollars in the purchase of slaves ; had she spent it in 
developing her elements of wealth, she would have been to-day one of the richest 
commonwealths in the world. The extraordinary extent and nature of her min- 
eral stores, the fertility of her fields for cotton, the cereals and fruits, the 
grandeur of her forests, the length of her streams, and her lovely climate, will 
render her, after the dreary transition period is past, one of the most opulent 
of the Southern States. 

The expedition of De Soto through Alabama, three centuries and a-half ago, 
was among the most remarkable of his time. This brave Spaniard, with his 
little band, while pushing across the new and hostile country to the harbor at 
Pensacola, where ships with supplies from Havana awaited him, was attacked 
by swarms of warriors under the chief Tuscaloosa, at an Indian town, said 
to have been near the present site of Selma, and there fought one of the 
bloodiest battles of early American history. Turning his face northward and 
westward once more, he fought his way, step by step, to the Mississippi river, 
leaving the savages some ghastly memorials of Spanish pluck and valor, but 
having done nothing toward the colonization of the great territory later known 
as Alabama. 

One hundred and sixty-two years thereafter, another European expedi- 
tion appeared at Pensacola, but finding the Spaniards in possession there, cast 
anchor at Ship Island, and finally at Biloxi. Iberville, who had been com- 
missioned by France to found settlements on the Mississippi, planted the seed 
of the colonies, which Bienville brought to such abundant harvest. Slaves were 
introduced into Alabama, then a part of Louisiana, under the regime of John 
Law's great Mississippi Company, and rice and tobacco and indigo were success- 
fully cultivated. A little more than a century after the first French occupation, 
Alabama had nearly 200,000 whites, and 1 1 7,000 blacks within her borders, and 
seemed springing more rapidly into development than most of the other States 
of the Union. 

The area of Alabama is 50,722 square miles, of which the cotton and timber 
regions comprise about 10,000, and the mineral section 15,000 square miles. 
The cotton-fields have been the basis of the State's wealth, and will continue 



Alabama's varied resources. 329 

one of her chief supports ; but to her minerals and manufactures must she 
look for that development of large manufacturing towns and wonderful increase 
of population which has marked the growth of other States, uniting, as she does, 
a superabundance of agricultural and mineral resources. It is supposed that not 
more than half the available cotton lands are at present under cultivation. From 
the rich Tennessee valley to the fertile Gulf coast there is such a combination of 
natural treasures as no country in Europe can boast. Alabama can produce all 
the grains and esculents of the Northern States, yet to-day whole sections of the 
State are dependent on the North-west for bread, because the foolish " all 
cotton" policy is continued from slave times. 

Lying at the foot of the Alleghany mountains, which, in the north-we'stern 
portion of the State, bow their giant heads stupidly, and lean lazily toward the 
level earth, she possesses grand mineral beds, similar to those which crop out at 
intervals along the range through Pennsylvania, Virginia and Tennessee. Her 
river system is one of the noblest on the continent. It comprehends the Tennes- 
see, which courses through eight northern counties, and affords a fertile, 
although somewhat exhausted, cotton valley; the Alabama and her tribu- 
taries-; and the Tombigbee, the Black Warrior and the Coosa. These are all 
navigable. The Chattahoochee river is the boundary line between Georgia and 
Alabama; and in the lower part of the State several of the rivers flowing 
through Florida to the Gulf furnish navigation to the border counties. 

The improvement of the Coosa and the Cahawba rivers, so that they shall be 
navigable all the way from the mineral fields to their junction with the Alabama, 
is considered of the utmost importance. Some of the richest iron mines and 
coal-fields in the State are on the Upper Coosa, beyond its navigable portion. 
Surveys have been provided for under the reconstruction governments, but as 
yet little has been accomplished. The upper portion of the Black Warrior river 
drains the 'Warrior coal-field, and could be made of vast service in future. 

The opening of the Coosa river would give to the markets of Montgomery 
and Mobile the produce of a section of Alabama which now finds its outlet in 
Georgia, and it would furnish the cotton belt of the State with cheap grain — a 
most important consideration ; while, at the same time, it will afford fine water 
power for manufactures. Mobile is anxious to become a grain depot, like New 
Orleans, for the corn trade of the West with Europe. The improvement of the 
Coosa river and of Mobile harbor would accomplish this. 

The needed opening of the Tennessee river, which I have alluded to else- 
where, would be of the greatest value to Northern Alabama; and a canal from 
the Tennessee to the Coosa, cut through at a point where the streams are not 
more than forty miles apart, would give a continuous water line from the north- 
west to Mobile bay.* This would become one of the most popular and eco- 
nomical of national highways, and would be lined, throughout Alabama, with 
manufacturing towns. 

The timber region of Alabama comprises a belt extending entirely across 
the lower portion of the State, bordering on Florida and the Gulf. It is rich in 

* "Alabama Manuals." 



330 THE ALABAMA COTTON REGION. 

forests of long-leaved pine, and on the river lowlands grow white, black and 
Spanish oaks, and the black cypress. Cotton can be produced in the light, sandy 
soil of this section, but the gathering of naval stores is a more productive 
industry in these border counties. Between Mobile and Pascagoula bays many 
settlements are springing up, and enterprising young men from the North and 
West are sending millions of feet of lumber to the New Orleans market. The 
lands can be purchased for a trifle ; and there are many small bays and 
estuaries where vessels for any port in the world might load directly at the 
saw-mill. 

In the cotton belt, which also extends across Alabama, from the Missis- 
sippi to the Georgia line, there are many large towns which would, in hap- 
pier times, be flourishing, and whose appearance testifies to a long reign of 
wealth, elegance, and culture within their limits. Montgomery, Selma, Demopo- 
lis, Livingston, Eutaw, Greensboro, Marion, are all inhabited or surrounded by 
planters who are, or have once been wealthy, and who have gathered about them 
fine private schools, libraries and churches. 

South-eastward through the cotton country, from the capital, runs the Mont- 
gomery, Eufaula and Brunswick railroad, intended as part of a gigantic line 
some day to be completed from Brunswick, Georgia, on the Atlantic coast, to 
Vicksburg, on the Mississippi ; and other lines are here and there projected. It 
often occurs to one that Alabama is indulging in an "overcrop" of railways, 
considering the abundance of her superb water-courses. 

The soil of the Alabama cotton belt is inexhaustibly rich. This is the testi- 
mony of all observers, native and foreign. That it has in some sections been 
forced, so as to be, for a time, less productive than usual, there can be no doubt ; 
but with anything like decent care it will grow cotton as long as will the soil of 
Egypt. But there has been a terrible fall in prices, and hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of planters have been utterly ruined. Good lands there once com- 
manded $50 per acre; those same lands now command possibly $10, in some 
instances $5. The enormous fertility of this section is shown by the fact that in 
i860, just before the slave system was broken up, it produced 997,978, almost 
1,000,000 bales of cotton, or one-fifth of the whole crop of the United States for 
that year. The planters there, as elsewhere, would prefer the free labor which 
they now employ, rather than slaves, if the free labor could be relied on to work 
with a view to getting as good results for his employer as the slave did for his 
owner. 

There are, of course, great multitudes of negroes on these cotton lands, who, 
as a rule, labored well, in spite of the savage reverses experienced by the whole 
planting interest of Alabama for some years, until the continuous disaster dis- 
couraged them, and they took refuge either in emigration or a precarious 
dependence upon the charity of others but little richer than themselves. But 
whatever may be the condition of large planters, or of the freedmen, who are, of 
course, more or less ignorant and irresponsible, there is no doubt that industrious 
and capable immigrants, settling in the cotton belt, and carefully cultivating from 
forty to fifty acres of land, with ten in cotton and an equal number in grain and 



MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA. 33 I 

provisions, could become wealthy. The main suffering, which has been great 
in Alabama, has occurred because the people raised but little food. Relying 
entirely upon cotton, when that failed they found themselves penniless and starv- 
ing. This suffering does not come, however, save when the crops are absolutely 
destroyed by caterpillars or by rains. If the Alabama planters could succeed for 
a few years, they might have money to invest in the much needed local manu- 
factures, but at present they have none, and foreign capital does not flow to them. 

Going from Opelika, by rail, to Montgomery, I found in the cars the usual 
number of rough but honest folk bound for Texas ; a sprinkling of commercial 
Hebrews, who bitterly bewailed the misfortunes attendant on the failure of the 
cotton crop during two successive years ; and some very intelligent colored men 
journeying to the Legislature, then in session. 

People generally complained of a desperate condition of affairs, consequent 
upon the crop failures, and spoke with bitterness of the poverty which had over- 
taken both whites and blacks. The lands around Montgomery were, every one 
admitted, wonderfully rich, but the caterpillar had devastated the fields as fast as 
the planter had planted them ; and tlfe consequence was that many persons were 
not only overwhelmed with debt, but hardly knew where they were to get any- 
thing to eat. My visit to Montgomery fully demonstrated to me that these 
statements were in no wise exaggerated. 

Montgomery county, in which the capital of the State is situated, once com- 
prehended a large portion of Central Alabama, but now includes only eight 
hundred square miles. There are nearly three times as many blacks as whites 
within its limits. It has usually been considered first on the list of the agricultural 
counties of the State, and in the first rank in wealth. No section of the South, 
not even the wonderfully rich Mississippi delta, offers better soil for the growing 
of cotton and corn. The undulating prairie and the fertile alluvial afford every 
chance for the amassing of riches. Five great railways run through the town 
and the county, and the river navigation is excellent. 

It was difficult to conceive how this marvelous section had fallen into such 
decay that the market-place of Montgomery was filled with auctioneers presiding 
over sheriffs' sales, and that there was a general complaint of poverty, much des- 
titution, and, in some cases, despair. The citizens explained that the failure of 
the " crops " (the crops meaning cotton) during two years, and the arrival of the 
panic, had completely worsted them. The negroes employed by planters were 
discharged by hundreds when the panic came, and having, as a mass, no means, 
constituted a " bread or blood " populace, whose presence in the country was in 
the highest degree embarrassing. The Mayor of the city gave these unfortunate 
people charity out of his own purse for a long time, until other cities and towns 
rallied and sent in help. Stealing was, of course, frequently resorted to by the 
freedmen as soon as they were idle, and the whole country round was pillaged. 
Owing to the ravages of the caterpillar, Montgomery's tributary crop, which 
usually amounts to 60,000 or 70,000 bales, had fallen to one-third that amount 

Montgomery has a double historic interest as a capital, for it was there that 
the Confederacy first established its seat of government ; there that its " provis- 



332 



THE STATE CAPITOL MORTGAGE SALES. 



ional congress" assembled for two months; and the house occupied at that time 
by Jefferson Davis is still pointed out. The town is prettily situated on the 
Alabama river, and used to export 100,000 bales of cotton, much of which 
was floated down the current of the great stream. As a manufacturing centre, it 
would be very advantageous, but, although Alabama has exempted manufactures 
from taxation, no effort has, as yet, been made there to establish them. Mont- 
gomery, therefore, a town of fourteen thousand inhabitants, with fair transporta- 
tion facilities, many elegant business blocks, fine churches, a good theatre, an 
elegant court-house, and a mammoth hotel, has a valuation of only $6,500,000, 
and its streets are filled with black and white idlers. 

If the negroes could be persuaded to show the same industry in manufactur- 
ing that they do in attending mortgage sales, the section would not lack capable 
workers. I was told in the market square that some of the negroes had come 
sixty miles — many from the mountains of Coosa county — to attend upon the 
sales, and on these expeditions were accustomed to be absent from their farms 
for days together. The plantations in all the adjacent belt were expected to go 

off at sheriffs' sales at the time of 
my visit. How many of them the 
original owners managed to retain in 
their possession, I know not, but I 
think the number must have been 
small. 

The Capitol building, crowning a 
fine eminence, from which one could 
get a view of the town spread out over 
the undulating country, was surrounded 
with the usual number of negroes, old 
and young, who seemed to have no 
thought whatever for the morrow. A 
few gray-headed Africans Avere seated 
on the gateway steps as I went in, 

The Alabama State Capitol at Montgomery. anc J moved lazily and gl'Umblingly 

aside to let me pass. The colored legislators lounging about the lobbies, waiting 
for the session to begin, were of a rather higher type than those in South 
Carolina and Louisiana. There were a good many among them who were lightly 
tinctured with Caucasian blood, and all were smartly dressed and aggressive in 
their demeanor. 

When the " House " assembled, I went in, and found the honorable repre- 
sentatives engaged in a stirring battle over some measures which the Conserva- 
tives desired to pass before, and the Radicals to hinder, until the close of the 
session. The speaker, the Honorable Lewis E. Parsons, was the first provisional 
Governor under reconstruction, and remained in office until, under the new 
constitution, provision had been made for the election of a Governor and General 
Assembly in 1865. He is a good Republican and an honest man, and has done 
much in staying the tide of ignorance and oppression from overwhelming the State. 




RECONSTRUCTION IN ALABAMA. 333 

Alabama, even after she was supposed to be reconstructed, flatly refused to 
recognize the Fourteenth Amendment, and was consequently remanded to her 
provisional condition as a conquered province, and Robert M. Patton, the suc- 
cessor of Governor Parsons, found himself under the supervision of the Brigadier- 
General commanding the district, of which Alabama formed a part. A new 
constitutional convention was held ; blacks carried over whites the adoption of a 
constitution in complete harmony with the requirements of Congress, and in the 
summer of 1868, William H. Smith became the Republican Governor of the State. 
Under his administration began the era of domination of the hybrid legislature, 
and it is not surprising that the State was shaken to its centre by the ensuing 
legislation. The Legislature was besieged by persons interested in railway 
schemes, and the State's credit was pledged in the most prodigal fashion. At the 
same time immigration to the State was hindered by the operations of the Ku- 
Klux and by the exaggerated bitterness of the white Alabamians, who did not 
seem willing to forgive the North for having forced negro suffrage upon them ; 
and in the counties where the negroes were in the majority there was the mis- 
management, turmoil, and tyranny which prevailed in other States of the South. 
In 1870, Robert B. Lindsay was elected Governor, but Governor Smith refused to 
vacate his office, on the ground that Lindsay had been fraudulently elected, and 
surrounded himself with Federal soldiers. Lindsay was, however, declared 
elected, and the State had two Governors and two Legislatures, until Governor 
Smith was ousted by a writ from the Circuit Court. Governor Lindsay was 
succeeded, in 1872, by David P. Lewis, who was in power at the time of my 
visit. The various railroad complications have somewhat impaired the State's 
credit, and Alabama has latterly found it very difficult to meet the interest upon 
bonds which she had endorsed for some of the new railroad enterprises. The 
Alabama and Chattanooga road, the Montgomery and Eufaula, the Selma and 
Gulf roads have all aided in the embarrassment in which Alabama is plunged 
to-day by the lamentable condition of her State indebtedness. 

In the House of Representatives the colored members appeared to have 
voluntarily taken seats on one side of the house, and the Conservatives, who were 
in like manner assembled on the other, were overwhelmed by a deafening chorus 
of " Mr. Speaker ! " from the colored side, whenever they proposed any measure. 
Sometimes the colored opponents would show that they misapprehended the 
attitude of their white friends, and then long and wearisome explanations and 
discussions were entered upon, enlivened only by an occasional outburst of a 
dusky member, who fiercely disputed the floor with his ex- master, and whose 
gestures were only equaled in eccentricity by his language. The Senate was a 
more dignified body ; in it there were some gentlemen of distinguished presence 
and considerable eloquence. 

But at Montgomery, as elsewhere throughout the reconstructed States, it was 
easy to see that ignorance and corruption had done much to injure the morale of 
the State. The worst feature observable was a kind of political stagnation in the 
minds of the white people — a mute consent to almost any misfortune which 
might happen. This was more dreadful and depressing than the negro igno- 

22 



334 



IGNORANCE MANUFACTURES IN THE STATE. 



ranee. I do not mean to have it inferred that the whites in Alabama are all 
educated. The ignorance of the poorer white classes in the country is as dense 
as that of the blacks ; and there is evidence of rough and reckless manners 
of living. Nothing but education and a thorough culture of the soil — a genuine 




farming — will ever 
build up the broken 
fortunes of this once 
wealthy section of 
Alabama. Coming 
down from the 



The Market-place at Montgomery, Alabama. 



Capitol, one sunlit 
autumn morning, I 
was fairly amazed 
at the great congre- 
gation of idle ne- 
p;roes in the market 



square. They were squatted at corners ; they leaned against walls, and cowered 
under the canvas of the huge country wagons; they chattered like magpies at the 
shop doors, and swarmed like flies around the cheap and villainous grog-shops 
which abounded. No one was at work ; none had any thought for the morrow. 
Those with whom I stopped to converse " cursed their dull fate " in the mild, 
deprecatory manner peculiar to the African. Their descriptions of the caterpillar, 
Avho feeds upon the leaves of the cotton plant, and of its able assistant, the boll- 
worm, who buries himself inside the cotton-boll, and feeds on it until it is entirely 
gone, were graphic and amusing, but it would require almost countless pages 
to translate them here. 

The strip of country extending between the cotton and mineral regions, and 
running from the north-east to the middle and eastern part of the State, is 
admirably adapted both to agriculture and manufactures. Opelika, Wetumpka, 
Centerville, Tuscaloosa, Scottsville, Prattsville, Tallassee, Autaugaville, and other 
nourishing towns, are located in it. It is traversed by the Selma and Rome, 
the Montgomery and West Point, the South and North, and the Alabama and 
Chattanooga railroads. 

Lying directly on the high road between New York and New Orleans, and 
traversed by rivers flowing from the mountains over many rocky barriers toward 
the lowlands, — thus forming innumerable falls suitable for maufacturing power, : — 
it has already attracted much attention, and many factories are established 
within its limits. A number of prosperous factories were destroyed during the 
war; but the extensive cotton-mills at Tallassee, on the Tallapoosa river, the 



NEED OF CAPITAL THE MINERALS OF ALABAMA. 335 

Granite factory in Coosa county, the mills in Prattsville, and the Bell factory 
near Huntsville, all demonstrate the success which might attend similar new- 
enterprises. 

It is observed that, in spite of the cheapness of labor in England, Alabama 
manufacturers will soon be able to take cotton from 'adjacent plantations, spin 
it into yarn, and sell it in England at a greater profit than the English 
manufacturer, who buys American cotton in Liverpool and makes it into yarn 
in England, can ever obtain.* The advantage of the water power in such States 
as Alabama over the steam power necessarily employed in Great Britain is very 
large. 

The crying need of the State is capital ; she is like so many of her neighbors, 
completely broken by the revolution, and unable to take the initiative in measures 
essential to her full development. With capital operating beneficently, Alabama 
could so bring her cheap cotton, cheap coal, cheap iron, and cheap living, to bear, 
as to seize and firmly retain a leading position among manufacturing States. 

North of the manufacturing region, and extending 160 miles from north-east 
to south-west, is the mineral region of the State. Railroads traverse it in all 
directions ; the South and North binds it to Montgomery, and gives it an outlet 
toward Nashville and Louisville, via Decatur ; the Alabama and Chattanooga 
gives it easy access to the rolling-mills of Chattanooga ; the Selma, Rome and 
Dalton cuts through it to connect with the Kennesaw route to New York. It is 
as yet in many respects a wild country, sparsely populated, and rough in appear- 
ance. In one day's journey along the line of the North and South railroad, I saw 
hardly any town of considerable size ; in the forest clearings there were assem- 
blages of rough board houses, and brawny men and scrawny women looked from 
the doors ; now and then we passed a coal-shoot, and now long piles of iron ore. 
There was little of interest save the material fact of the abundant riches of this 
favored section. The mountains were nowhere imposing ; they were hump- 
backed and overgrown ; but they held, it was easy to see, mighty secrets. 

There are three distinct coal-fields in the carboniferous formation, which, 
with the- silurian, shares all but the south-east corner of this mineral region. 

The most extensive is the Warrior field, which has an area of three thousand 
square miles of a bituminous soft coal, lying in horizontal beds from one to four 
feet thick. It covers that portion of the State drained by the Black Warrior 
river and its tributaries, and extends quite into the north-eastern corner, between 
Lookout mountain and the Tennessee river. The field along the Cahawba river 
has beds from one to eight feet thick, extending over an area of 700 square miles. 
The Tennessee field, north of the Tennessee river, has large stores of bituminous 
coal, and the three together cover 4,000 square miles. Close beside them, from 

* There are now a dozen prosperous cotton factories in Alabama, in its middle and northern 
portions. The Tallassee mills have 18,000 spindles; two at Prattsville have 4,000 each ; and 
others, averaging about the same, at Huntsville, Florence, Tuscaloosa, Autaugaville, and in 
Pickens county, are prosperous. These mills regularly pay large dividends ; it is not uncommon 
for cotton-mills in the South to pay twenty per cent., and twelve to fifteen is the average. 
White labor exclusively is employed. 



336 BIRMINGHAM RED MOUNTAIN. 

north-east to south-west, run beds of red and brown hematite, and limestone and 
sandstone are near at hand. The South and North railroad runs through the 
Warrior coal-field for more than fifty miles. It is surprising that, with such 
superb facilities for transportation, more has not been done toward the devel- 
opment of this section. Grand highways run in all the principal directions 
across iron-beds ; a few branch tracks only being needed to cover every square 
mile with a network of communication. 

I made a journey to Birmingham, the four-year-old child of the mineral 
development, and was surprised to note how solidly it had grown up. The route, 
from Montgomery to within a few miles of Calera, where the Selma, Rome and 
Dalton road crosses the South and North, lay through forests of 'yellow pine. 
We saw few farms and but little cleared land. A little above Calera, we came 
into the Coosa river section. That stream runs to the eastward of the railroad, 
and for many miles offers excellent sites for the establishment of manufactures. 
Lime-kilns are to be seen scattered all through the country ; one hundred and 
fifty thousand barrels of lime being annually made, it is said, at and near Calera. 
The blue limestone of the silurian formation, so abundant there, is especially 
valuable. The road also traverses the zone of the deposits of fibrous brown 
hematite, extending north-easterly from Tuscaloosa, where it is said to be a 
hundred feet thick. On this ore belt several prosperous furnaces — the Roup's 
Valley, the Briarfield, the Shelby, and the Oxford — are located. An able 
engineer, Mr. Hiram Haines, of Alabama, says that the cost of the reduction of 
this iron at these furnaces is about twenty dollars per ton. 

Crossing the Cahawba coal-field, and Red mountain, which forms the western 
boundary, I came into the valley of Shades creek, which presents a very advan- 
tageous position for the location of iron works. Here are the Red Mountain and 
Irondale Iron Works, whose furnaces can produce forty tons daily. The vast 
bed of fossiliferous ore which extends along the northern ridge of Red mountain 
runs from a point a score of miles east of Tuscaloosa to the north-eastern limit of 
the State. Where the railway crosses it, it is thirty feet in thickness. Like 
its famous compeer in Missouri, the " mountain " hardly merits its name, being 
simply an elevated ridge. The ore is everywhere easily accessible ; I noted from 
point to point very successful excavations close to the railroad. The "mountain" 
is said to be one hundred miles in length, and it is estimated that it bears fifteen 
million tons of iron ore to the mile. 

The Pennsylvania iron- masters have not allowed this ore to go unnoticed, and 
the English have made it an especial study. A little beyond the gap which 
allows the railroad to leave the coal-field, the projected route of the Mobile Grand 
Trunk road crosses the South and North ; and, a short distance farther on, at 
the intersection of the Alabama and Chattanooga with the South and North, 
the town of Birmingham has sprung into a praiseworthy activity. In eighteen 
months from the date of building the first house there was a permanent 
population of four thousand people. The town was handsomely laid out in 
streets lined with imposing brick blocks, and the two finely built railways run- 
ning through it brought to it crowds of daily visitors. If the development of the 



DESCRIPTION OF BIRMINGHAM'S RESOURCES. 33/ 

South justifies the building of the proposed route from Atlanta, Georgia, through 
Birmingham to connect with the Southern Trans- Continental; of the connecting 
link from Opelika north-westerly through Birmingham to the Tennessee at Pitts- 
burg Landing ; of the Grand Trunk road, and the Ashley branch of the Selma, 
Rome and Dalton road, giving a short line from the coal and iron country to the 
Gulf — the new mineral capital will be indeed fortunate ! 

Birmingham is very centrally located in the mineral region, which comprises 
most of Shelby, Jefferson, Bibb, Walker, Tuscaloosa, Blount, St. Clair, Calhoun, 
Talladega, Randolph, and Cherokee counties. Red mountain seems to have 
been pushed above the unattractive soil in these rude fields as a beacon, and 
a temptation to explorers. It looms up in Jones's valley, the site of Birming- 
ham, as the creator and guardian of the little city's destinies, and offers its 
treasures freely to the miner, the iron being covered with but a thin coating of 
soil. The Red mountain ores have a usual yield of fifty to fifty-eight per cent ; 
and this mountain stretches, a narrow strip, for miles and miles, between two 
of the most wonderful coal-beds on the continent! 

On my arrival at Birmingham, one afternoon, I found the good Mayor of the 
little city in bed, he, with other citizens, having been engaged all the previous 
night in quelling a negro riot, caused by the discontent and pressing necessities 
of the inhabitants of the back-country. An armed band of blacks had ridden 
into the town, and some fires had been started in a low quarter, evidently with 
the design of diverting attention to the conflagration while the provision stores 
were robbed. But the citzens succeeded in capturing the would-be robbers, and 
providing them with food and lodging in jail. This incident served to show the 
really hazardous position in which the negro is placed in some portions of the 
State. Untoward circumstances and outside financial pressure leave him abso- 
lutely without anything to eat ; for he depends almost entirely on the outer 
world for his supplies. 

Birmingham lies in the centre of a charming valley about ten miles wide, 
and about eighty miles in length. It is, perhaps, six hundred feet above 
the sea-level, and the valley is supposed to be the result *of a vast upheaval 
of the silurian rocks, which upheaval or convulsion was evidently instrumental 
in dividing what was one huge coal-field into several. Another result of the 
rupture is a range of hills running down the centre of the valley, and contain- 
ing deposits of brown hematite. Along the slope of the Red mountain there 
is a notable outcrop of variegated marble and sulphate of barytes, and lead 
ores are scattered throughout the neighborhood. The hematites on the north- 
eastern slope of the Red mountain are exposed for a thickness of from fifteen 
to twenty-five feet ; and many believe that a complete examination will show 
deposits one hundred feet thick. Here is a supply of iron for centuries to come; 
but Birmingham" does not depend on the Red mountain alone. To the west, 
the north-west, and the north, there are fine deposits of ore, situated close to 
coal unsurpassed in quality for the manufacture of iron. The Elyton Land 
Company, which owned extensive tracts in Jones's valley, took the initiative in 
building Birmingham, and succeeded so well that the little town is expected to 



338 FACILITIES FOR MINING. 

have a cotton factory and extensive car shops, as well as to be girdled by a ring 
of iron-furnaces. In the vicinity there are already numerous furnaces. Pennsyl- 
vania iron-masters are developing Irondale ; the Red Mountain Iron Works are 
undergoing revival, after a long sleep since the war; and the largest Southern 
and English firms interested in iron manufacture are investigating the resources 
of Alabama iron tracts. The coal interests are receiving equal attention, and 
shafts have been sunk in the Warrior and Cahawba fields. The Irondale and 
Ironton furnaces are undoubtedly the most extensive on Red mountain, the two 
together producing about forty tons of pig-iron daily, while the Alabama Iron 
Company, located seventeen miles above Birmingham, is yearly sending North 
great quantities of ore. All the way from Jefferson county, through St. Clair, 
until it loses itself in the Lookout range, the Red mountain carries abundant 
stores. In Cherokee, Calhoun and Talladega counties, within easy reach of 
the Selma, Rome and Dalton railroad, there are furnaces in operation. At the 
Shelby Iron Works, in Shelby county, there is an extensive foundry for working 
up the famous "brown ore." The Briarfield Iron Works, in Bibb county, 
are also famous, and in Clay county it is believed that there are sufficient 
indications of magnetic ore to justify the establishment of furnaces. It is evident 
that a large town is to arise at some point in this region, and Birmingham seems 
to have secured the precedence. 

The stores of copper and marl in Alabama are quite remarkable. In Ran- 
dolph, Clay and Coosa counties, copper has been mined successfully, and lead 
has been found in Baker county. Gold has been mined from time to time since 
1843, in Eastern Alabama, being found in small quantities. Silver shafts are said 
to have been sunk there by De Soto. The marble, granite and slate quarries of 
the State are rich, and will furnish cheap material for future cities, when the iron 
interest shall begin to build them. Of tin, plumbago, fire-clay, and kaolin and 
lime, there are abundant stores. The marls of Alabama are expected, in due 
time, to furnish a very important branch of industry. They contain properties 
of the highest fertilizing character when applied to worn-out lands, and offer the 
sections of the State which have been overworked under the old planting system 
a chance of renewal. 

It is certain that large manufacturing communities are to spring up within the 
next few years, in the mineral region of Northern and North-eastern Alabama. 
The facility with which iron, coal and limestone can be reached, mined, and sent 
to furnaces or to market ; the cheapness of labor and land, and the facilities for 
intercommunication, both by rail and water, are great recommendations. The 
iron ores are so rich, and such fine steel can be readily made from them, that 
they are certain to tempt capitalists to unearth them. The manufactured iron 
can be produced at about the same price as that of the cheapest regions in 
England. 

The Alabama and Chattanooga railroad, consolidated from several lines, and 
purchased by a number of Boston capitalists, runs through the beautiful Wills' 
valley, near Chattanooga, and will, doubtless, draw much of the mineral interest 
of the Alabama district toward that city. 



XXXV. 

NORTHERN ALABAMA — THE TENNESSEE VALLEY— TRAITS OF 
CHARACTER — EDUCATION. 

THERE is much of quiet beauty in Northern Alabama, much also that is bold, 
rugged, even grand. The Tennessee valley seems to combine the love- 
liest characteristics of a Northern, with all the fragrant luxuriance and voluptu- 
ousness of a Southern climate. Here and there arise grand mountains ; one 
encounters rapids and noisy waterfalls ; vast stretches of forest ; huge areas 
covered by ill-kept and almost ruined plantations, where the victims of the revo- 
lution are struggling with the mysteries of the labor question, and the changing 
influences of the times. The Memphis and Charleston railway, which runs 
through this valley from Chattanooga, and which is the connecting link in the 
great through route from the Mississippi to the Atlantic ocean, has done much in 
developing the country, but does not seem to have increased population to any 
large degree. There are some handsome and thriving towns along its line ; 
pretty Huntsville, Decatur, Tuscumbia with its miraculous spring, and Florence, 
Tuscumbia's near neighbor, at the present head of navigation on the Tennessee, 
with its cotton factory, are all indications of the beauty and vivacity which 
this section will boast when new people come in. At Stevenson, whither the 
Nashville and Chattanooga railroad comes in its search for a passage through the 
apparently impassable mountains, the beauty of the great ranges is indescribable. 
The red loam of the valley will produce the best of cotton and corn, rye and bar- 
ley, and small farmers, in this favorable climate, and with some little capital to 
start upon, could once more give this section its old name of "the garden of the 
South." The large plantations are much neglected, in many cases ruined; the 
planters are discouraged, and the negroes perplexed and somewhat demoralized 
by the great changes of the past few years. There has undoubtedly been a large 
falling off in the amount of cotton production in this section of Alabama, since 
the close of the war ; and as the trail of the armies through it was marked with 
blood and fire, it is, perhaps, not very astonishing that the delay in restoration 
has been so great. If any portion of the South needs a total renewal of its 
population, it is this one ; and an influx of Northern or foreign farmers would 
build it up in a short time. 

Inasmuch as the Tennessee river passes through the entire breadth of North 
Alabama from east to west, the State is as much interested as Tennessee in the 
opening of navigation at Muscle Shoals, feeling convinced that the manufacturing 
interests at Florence would be revivified, that the valley would thus secure a 
cheap transportation route to market, and that the carrying of minerals, especially 
coal, w:>uld be made one of the great businesses of the section. 



34-0 TOWNS IN THE TENNESSEE VALLEY. 

Huntsville has the honor of being the county seat of the richest agricultural 
county in the Tennessee valley, and is noted as the location of the convention 
that formed the State constitution, as the seat of the first Legislature of the com- 
monwealth, and the place at which the first Alabama newspaper was issued. 
The city, which has some five thousand inhabitants, sits upon a low hill, from 
whose base gushes out a limestone spring, ample enough to supply the popula- 
tion with water. Through this country the weight of war was felt heavily ; the 
people of Huntsville suffered much, and the devastation in the country, caused 
by both armies, was very great. Huntsville has some fine schools for young- 
ladies ; the Greene Academy, a resort of great numbers of the young men of 
Tennessee, was destroyed during the war by the Union troops. 

Decatur was nearly submerged when I saw it, so that I can hardly attempt a 
description. Rain poured heavily down ; the Tennessee, on whose south bank 
the town lies, was rampant, and the railroad seemed running through a lake. 
From Decatur toward Nashville, Tennessee, the railway route leads through a 
wild, hilly country, where the land is not especially good. Tuscumbia also 
suffered greatly in war time. It is noted for a spring, like Huntsville, but that of 
Tuscumbia is of pure freestone water, and springing from the plain in which the 
town is built, discharges 17,000 cubic feet of water every minute. Florence is 
connected with Tuscumbia by a branch of the Memphis and Charleston road, 
and was once a formidable commercial rival to Nashville. It was hindered by 
the war from completing the fine manufacturing enterprises which it was inaugur- 
ating, but is now making new efforts to centralize cotton spinning there. The 
Wesleyan University and the Synodical Institute, flourishing institutions, are 
located at Florence. 

Farmers, and real farming, — not a loose planting and dependence on cotton, — 
are the principal needs of this section of the Tennessee valley. 

The people of Alabama are as varied as is the topography of their lovely 
State, but most of them distinguished for frankness and generosity of character. 
It is a land of beautiful women ; one even now and then sees among the 
degraded poor whites, who "dip snuff" and talk the most outrageous dialect, 
some lovely creature, who looks as poetic as a heathen goddess, until one hears 
her speak, or she pulls from her pocket a pine stick, with an old rag saturated 
in snuff wrapped around it, and inserts it between her dainty lips. 

Here and there, in my journeys up and down the State, I saw the tall, long- 
haired, slender men who were so common a sight in the Alabama regiments 
during the war, and whose extraordinary height sometimes puzzled even the 
giants from Maine and Minnesota. The countrymen in the interior districts were 
much like those all through the cotton districts, bounded, prejudiced and ignorant 
of most things outside the limits of their State ; difficult to drive into any con- 
clusion, but easy to lead ; generally conciliatory in their demeanor toward 
Northerners, but possessed of some little distrust of their alert and earnest ways. 
The gentlemen of means and culture whom I met were charming companions, 
and usually accomplished. They had the flavor of the country gentleman, and 
much of his repose, with the breeding and training of city life. 



OCCASIONAL BITTERNESS AND OSTRACISM. 341 

l 

Of course I encountered many bitter people — men who were not at all friendly 
toward the North, and who declared that they were dissatisfied with the present 
condition of affairs; who cursed the negro, their own fate and the Federal Admin- 
istration ; but these were certainly the exceptions. The citizens of Alabama, as 
a mass, are as loyal to the idea of the Union to-day as are the citizens of New 
York', and have at times gone very far to welcome such reconstruction measures 
as are not instruments of oppression. In the sections where the lands are 
exhausted for the time being, or where crops have failed persistently, and the 
wolf of poverty is at the door, people have ceased to take any interest in State 
affairs, and are settling up their business and hastening to Texas. Now and then 
one sees a few tired and soiled men and women on the trains, and on inquiring 
their destination, finds they are on the return from Texas, which has not treated 
them as kindly as they anticipated ; but, as a rule, those who go remain. 

Here and there ostracism shows itself. There is some bitterness in Mobile, 
but I doubt if ordinarily a Northern Republican, voting there conscientiously for 
the best men, — not installing ignorance and vice in power under the Republican 
colors, — -would be criticised on account of his sentiments. In the back-country 
he would meet with more intolerance. The negro has such absolute freedom in 
Alabama that the whites have long ago given up any endeavor, save at election 
times, to check his extravagances. There is a law which prevents challenge at the 
polls, and gives the right to the challenged party to sue for damages. When a 
native Southerner turns and joins the Republicans, he is usually pretty thoroughly 
ostracised ; and this was the case with the gentleman who was Mayor of Mobile 
when I visited that city. As soon as he had joined the dominant party, he was 
"cut" in all the social relations ; his wife and children were badly treated, and no 
name was thought too harsh to apply to him, although he had once been 
considered a citizen of distinction. 

In some of the towns, as in Montgomery, and smaller communities in the 
region where the most distress prevails, the negroes seem to be absolutely depend- 
ent upon the charity of the white folks. Their lives are grossly immoral, and the 
women especially have but little conception of the true dignity of womanhood. 
One sees men and women, like Italian and Spanish beggars, slouching all day, 
from sun to shade, from shade to sun, living on garbage and the results of begging 
and predatory expeditions — a prey to any disease that comes along, and fester- 
ing in ignorance. Some of them have been trying agriculture, and have given it 
up in disgust, because they do not understand farming, and there is no one to 
teach them. They have flocked into the towns, and there remain, seemingly 
nourishing a vague idea that something will turn up. It often struck me that the 
thousands of idle negroes I saw were in the attitude of waiting. Their expectant 
air was almost pathetic to witness. It was the same thing which we so often 
remark in animals — that quaint and curious, yet despairing look in the eyes and 
poise of the body, which seemed to say : " I would like to read the riddle of my 
relation to the universe, but I cannot." So they occupy themselves lazily in 
lounging about the sheriff's sales of mortgaged property, — always a prominent 
sight in the South now-a-days, alas ! — or in begging of citizens and strangers 



342 Alabama's needs — education. 

with the greatest persistency. On the plantations they are the same as every- 
where else in the cotton States : not always honest when they work for other 
people, and reckless and improvident when they work for themselves. 

That there is plenty of enterprise in the State, there can be no doubt — no 
more doubt than that there is no money to assist it. Indeed, it is safe to predict 
for Alabama a sudden upspringing sometime into a marvelous growth, something 
like that of Texas, because the railroad communication is already so perfect, and 
the resources are so immense. As soon as a little money is accumulated, or 
foreign capital has gained courage to go in, we shall see an awakening in the 
beautiful commonwealth. It is rich in grand mountains, noble rivers, swelling 
prairies, mighty forests, lovely sea-coast, and everywhere there is a wealth of 
Southern blossom and perfume. The Northerner from America or Europe can 
readily accommodate himself to its climate, and can find any combination of 
resources that he may desire to develop. 

Something should be done to arrest the drainage toward Texas ; it is dwarf- 
ing the development of the Alabamian towns, and leaving them in an unpleasant 
predicament. There is a very large discouraged class in the State — people who 
were willing enough at the close of the war to accept its main results, and to 
devote themselves to a rebuilding, but who have been so embarrassed and hin- 
dered by the anomalous condition of labor and politics, and are so destitute of 
means with which to carry on new enterprises, that they prefer to fly to newer 
States. 

The spirit of nationality among the people in those sections of Alabama 
which have suffered most, has been somewhat broken, yet, according to the 
statement made to me by one of the most distinguished of Alabama's citizens, 
these same people need but the return of a little prosperity to make them con- 
tented. 

The commonwealth labors under a dreadful burden of ignorance ; the illit- 
eracy in some sections is appalling. With a population of a little over 
1,000,000, Alabama has more than 380,000 persons who can neither read nor 
write; and of these nearly 100,000 are whites. There are also large classes who 
can both read and write, but whose education goes no farther. Among the 
175,000 voters in the State, there is a newspaper circulation of 40,000 only. 
The negro does not seem to care for the papers. A good public school system 
was inaugurated in Alabama in 1854, and three years later nearly 90,000 children 
were attending school in the State ; but the advent of the war annulled the 
progress already made, and since reconstruction educational matters have been 
somewhat embroiled. The conduct of the schools is now in the hands of what is 
known as the State Board of Education, composed of the State Superintendent 
and two members from each Congressional district. This Board has full Legisla- 
tive powers, the Legislature being only revisory of its acts. The school fund 
receives from $500,000 to $600,000 annually from the State, one-third of it 
being interest on the fund bestowed by the General Government, and the 
remainder being made up of one-fifth of the commonwealth's general revenue — 
all the poll tax, the licenses, and the tax on insurance companies. This fund is 






CLOSING OF' THE SCHOOLS IN 1873. 



343 



nominally apportioned impartially to the whites and blacks in each county, and 
the trustees in each township are informed what their share is. Under this 
system, the average attendance at the various schools opened throughout the 
State, has been 150,000; but in 1873 the schools were all closed (save those in the 
large cities) on account of the inability of the State to pay teachers ! This cessa- 
tion has been productive of much harm and disorganization. Efforts have, how- 
ever, been made to resuscitate the State University at Tuscaloosa, which is not in 
a flourishing condition, and a normal college, for teachers of both sexes, has been 
started at Florence, in the northern part of the State. In Western Alabama, a 
colored university and normal college has been established at Marion, and a 
colored normal school is opened at Huntsville. The American Missionary 
Society also maintains a college for colored people at Talladega. 




The Cotton-Plain 



XXXVI. 

THE SAND-HILL REGION — AIKEN — AUGUSTA. 

AFTER many weeks of journeying in the South, through regions where 
hardly a house is to be seen, where the villages, looming up between 
patches of forest or canebrake, seem deserted and worm-eaten, and the people 
reckless and idle, the traveler is struck with astonishment and delight when he 
emerges into the busy belt extending from Aiken, in South Carolina, to Augusta, 
in Georgia. There he sees manufacturing villages, hears the whir of spindles, 
notes on every hand evidences of progressive industry, and wonders why it was 




A Street Scene in Augusta, Georgia. 

not so years before. Alas ! who can 
compute the sum of the lost opportu- 
nities of the Southern States ? 

This "sand-hill region," extending 
from the north-eastern border of South 
Carolina to the south-eastern border of 
Georgia, has many noteworthy aspects. 
Its climate has wonderful life-renewing 

properties for the invalid worn down with the incessant fatigues and changes of 
severer latitudes, and its resources for the establishment of manufactures, and 
for the growth of some of the most remarkable and valuable fruits, are unrivaled. 




THE SAND-HILL REGION AIKEN, SOUTH CAROLINA. 345 

The upper limit of the sand-hills in South Carolina is very clearly defined. 
They are usually found close to the rivers, and are supposed to be ancient 
sand -banks once not far from the sea -shore. They pass through the State, 
half-way between the ocean and the Blue Ridge, and are most thoroughly devel- 
oped near Aiken, Columbia, Camden, and Cheraw. They are usually clothed 
in aromatic pine forests. 

Down the slopes, in Georgia and South Carolina, run rivers, which in winter 
and spring are turbid with the washings from the red clay hills to the north- 
ward; and in the flat valleys scattered along these streams cotton and corn 
grow with remarkable luxuriance. In Georgia the hills run from the falls of the 
Savannah river at Augusta, south-west and north-east, as far as the Ogeechee 
river. The highest point in this curious range, at the United States Arsenal 
at Summerville, near Augusta, is hardly more than six hundred feet above the 
sea-level. The sand-hills are the home of the yellow and the " short-leaved " 
pine, the Spanish and water oak, the red maple, the sweet gum, the haw, the 
persimmon, the wild orange, and the China- tree; the lovely Kalmia Latifolia 
clothes the acclivities each spring in garments of pink and white ; the flaming 
azalea, the honey- suckle, the white locust, the China burr and other evergreens, 
the iris, the phlox, the silk grass, flourish there. 

In the open air, in the gardens, japonicas grow ten feet high and blossom late 
in winter; and the " fringe - tree " and the Lagerstremia Indica dot the lawns 
with a dense array of blossoms. Although the unstimulated surface soil of all 
this section will not produce cotton and the cereals more than two years in 
succession, yet it is prolific of the peach, the apricot, the pomegranate, the fig, 
the pear, all kinds of berries, and the grape, which grows there with surprising 
luxuriance; and all vegetables practicable in a northern climate ripen there in the 
months of April and May. 

A pleasant land, one is forced to declare. But this productiveness is the 
least of its advantages. The kindly climate is the chief glory of the sand-hill 
country. Aiken has achieved a great reputation as a winter residence for 
pulmonary invalids. The mild and equable temperature, and the dryness of the 
air, which allows the patient to pass most of his winter under the open sky, 
inhaling the fragrance of the pine wdods, have, year after year, drawn hundreds 
of exhausted Northerners thither. Before the war, the planter of the lowlands, 
and the merchants of New York and Boston alike, went to Aiken to recuperate ; 
the planter occupying a pleasant cottage during the summer, and the Northerner 
arriving with the first hint of winter. But now the planter comes no more with 
the splendor and spendthrift profusion of old, and the Northerner has the little 
town very much to himself. 

The accommodations have, for several years since the war, been insufficient ; 
but as the inhabitants creep back toward their old prosperity, they are giving 
Aiken the bright appearance of a Northern town, and the ill-looking, unpainted, 
rickety houses of the past are disappearing. Originally laid out by a railroad 
company, in 1833, as a future station of commercial importance, Aiken prospered 
until fire swallowed it up. a few years later. When the war came, great numbers 



346 "SAND-HILLERS" MANUFACTURES. 

of refugees rushed into it, and the misery and distress there were great. The 
tide of battle never swept through the town, Kilpatrick contenting himself with 
a partially successful raid in that direction when Sherman was on the road to 
Columbia ; and as soon as peace was declared the invalids flocked back again 
to haunt the springs and the pleasant woody paths, over which the jessamine 
day and night showers its delicious fragrance. 

Aiken is situated seventeen miles from the Savannah river and from Augusta, 
on the South Carolina railroad, which extends southward to Charleston. The 
inhabitants of the hill-country, a little remote from the towns, are decidedly 
primitive in their habits, and the sobriquet of " sand-hiller " is applied by South 
Carolinians to specimens of poor white trash, which nothing but a system of 
slave- aristocracy could ever have produced. The lean and scrawny women, 
without animation, their faces discolored by illness, and the lank and hungry 
men, have their counterparts nowhere among native Americans at the North ; 
it is incapable of producing such a peasantry. 

The houses of the better class of this folk, — the prosperous farmers, as dis- 
tinguished from the lazy and dissolute plebeians, — to whom the word "sand- 
hiller" is perhaps too indiscriminately given, are loosely built, as the climate 
demands little more than shelter. At night, immense logs burn in the fireplace, 
while the house door remains open. The diet is barbarous as elsewhere 
among the agricultural classes in the South — corn-bread, pork and "chick'n;" 
farmers rarely killing a cow for beef, or a sheep for mutton. Hot and bitter 
coffee smokes morning and night on the tables where purest spring water, 
or best of Scuppernong wine, might be daily placed — the latter with almost as 
little expense as the former. 

But the invalid visiting this region in search of health, and frequenting a 
town of reasonable size, encounters none of these miseries. At Augusta and 
at Aiken he can secure the comforts to which he is accustomed in the North, 
to which will be added a climate in which existence is a veritable joy. In 
the vicinity of Aiken many hundreds of acres are now planted with the grape ; 
and 2,500 gallons of wine to the acre have been guaranteed in some cases, 
although the average production must, of course, fall very much below that. 

The development of the resources for manufacturing in the region extending 
between and including Aiken and Augusta merits especial mention, and shows 
what may be done by judicious enterprise in the South. The extensive cotton 
manufactories at Augusta and Graniteville employ many hundreds of hands. 
Scarcely a quarter of a century ago the Augusta cotton manufacturing enterprise 
was inaugurated with but a small capital. It was the outgrowth of a demand 
for labor for the surplus white population — labor whose results should accrue at 
once to the benefit of the State, and of that population. In due time the canal at 
Augusta was constructed. 

The Augusta cotton factory, which was not at first prosperous, now has a 
capital stock of $600,000, upon which a quarterly dividend of five per cent, is 
paid. Thousands of spindles and hundreds of looms are now busy along the 
banks of the noble canal, where, also, have sprung up fine flour-mills and 



ALONG THE SAVANNAH RIVER AUGUSTA. 



347 



tobacco factories. The cotton-mill is filled with the newest and finest machinery, 
and has received the high compliment, from Senator Sprague, of Rhode Island, 
of being "the best arranged one in the United States." 

At Graniteville, in South Carolina, two or three miles beyond the Savannah 
river, extensive mills have also been erected, and eight million yards of cotton 
are annually made there. The manufacturing village is as tidy and thrifty as any 
in the North, and there is none in the South which excels it in a general aspect 
of comfort, unless it be that of the 
Eagle and Phoenix Company at Colum- 
bus, Georgia. Six miles from Augusta 
there is an extensive kaolin factory. 

Early on a bright summer morn- 
ing, while the inhabitants were still 
asleep, I entered Augusta, and Avalked 
through the broad, beautifully shaded 
avenues of this lovely Southern city. 
The birds gossiped languidly in the 
dense foliage, through which the sun 
was just peering; here and there the 
sand of the streets was mottled with 
delicate light and shade ; the omni- 
present negro was fawning and yawning 
on door- steps, abandoning himself to 
his favorite attitude of slouch. 

I wandered to the banks of the 
Savannah, which sweeps, in a broad 
and sluggish current, between high 




A Bell-Tower in Augusta, Georgia. 



banks, bordered at intervals with enormous mulberry trees. Clambering down 
among the giant boles of these sylvan monarchs, and stumbling from time 
to time over a somnolent negro fisherman, I could see the broad and fertile 
Carolina fields opposite, and scent the perfume which the slight breeze sent from 
the dense masses of trees in the town above me. 

Returning, an hour later, I found the place had awakened to a life and 
energy worthy of the brightest of Northern cities of its size. The superb 
Greene street, with its grand double rows of shade trees, whose broad boughs 
almost interlocked above, was filled with active pedestrians ; the noise of wagons 
and drays was beginning; the cheery markets were thronged with gossiping 
negro women ; and around the Cotton Exchange groups were already gathered 
busily discussing the previous day's receipts. 

Augusta's excellent railroad facilities, and her advantageous situation, have 
made her an extensive cotton market. The Georgia railroad is largely tributary 
to the town, although Savannah is of late years receiving much of the cotton 
which properly belongs to Augusta. The new railway stretching from Port 
Royal, in South Carolina, to Augusta, furnishes a convenient outlet, and the South 
Carolina and Central roads give communication with Charleston and Savannah. 



CHANGES IN COTTON-PLANTING. 



The Cotton Exchange was founded in 1872. For the cotton years of 1872- 
73, Augusta received 180,789 bales. The cotton factories in the city consume 
200 bales daily, and the Langley and the Hickman factories in South Carolina, 
and the Richmond mills in Georgia, are also supplied from this point. 
Cotton culture throughout all this section has greatly increased since the 
war. I was told that one man in Jackson county now grows a larger number of 
bales than the whole county produced previous to i860. 

The use of fertilizers, once so utterly discarded, is now producing the most 
remarkable results. But the planters in all the surrounding country give but 
little attention to a rotation or diversity of crops, so that any year's failure of 
the cotton brings them to financial distress, as they depend entirely upon the 
outer world for their supplies ; ' although, in some of the northern sections of 
the State they show an inclination to vary their course in this respect. Conver- 
sation with representative men from various parts of the State, who naturally 
flock into Augusta to inspect the market, showed, however, that there was a 
steady and genuine improvement in agriculture throughout Georgia. Lands 
which heretofore have been considered of superior quality for cotton-growing 
have, under the new regime, with careful fertilizing and culture, produced twice 
as much as during the epoch of slavery. 

According to universal testimony, the negro on these cotton-lands usually 
works well, "and when he does not," said a planter to me, "it is because he is 
poorly paid." Small farms seem to be increasing in Middle Georgia, and much 
of the cotton brought into Augusta is raised exclusively by white labor. The 
small farmers, who were before the war unable to produce a crop in competition 
with those who possessed a larger number of slaves, now find no difficulty in 
placing their crop in market, and securing good prices for it. 

Augusta, like Savannah, is a town built in the midst of a beautiful wood. 
The public buildings are embowered in foliage; the pretty City Hall, the Medical 
College, the Masonic and Odd Fellows' Halls peering out from knots of trees. 

Broad street, the main thor- 
oughfare, is well lined with 
commodious stores and resi- 
dences, and the streets lead- 
ing from it are well kept and 
shaded. In front of the City 
Hall stands a simple but 
massive monument, erected 
to the memory of the 
Georgian signers of the 
Declaration of American 
Independence. 

Tall men, as well as tall 

A Confederate Soldier's Grave at Augusta, Georgia fPage349.1 and graceful trees, abound in 

the streets, for the Georgian is dowered with a generous height. The policemen 
are clad in an amicable mingling of gray and blue. On the road to Summerville, 







CONFEDERATE GRAVES. 349 

the pretty suburb on one of the sand-hills three miles away, one sees the powder- 
mill, now disused, which supplied the Confederates with ammunition for many a 
day ; and in a lovely location, at the hill's top, is the extensive United States 
Arsenal, around which are grouped many workshops, built and occupied by the 
Confederates during the war. 

Nothing can exceed in quiet and reverent beauty the floral decoration of the 
principal cemetery of Augusta. Loving hands have lingered long over the Con- 
federate soldiers' graves, and the white headstones, neatly surrounded with box- 
wood hedges, nearly all bear inscriptions like the following, which show that 
even as in the North, the young were the first to go, and first to fall : 

"Joe E. R , 

Co. E., 4 Tenn. Cav. 

Died Feb. 17, 1863, 

Aged 19." 

Here and there tall posts have decorative mottoes worked in evergreen upon 

them, such as 

"The Sacred Trust of Heroes." 
"Our Boys in Grey." 

Augusta escaped the scourge of Invasion, but did not escape the ghost of 
Bereavement, who .has claimed such a large space among the pleasant shadows 
for his own particular ground. 

The old town had a stormy revolutionary history. Named after one of the 
royal princesses of England by Oglethorpe, it was an Indian outpost after 1735, 
and in constant danger from the savages, until taken and retaken by Briton and 
American during the revolution. The churches and the institutions of learning 
in Augusta are numerous, and the extensive fair-ground of the Cotton States' 
Mechanical and Agricultural Association occupies many pleasant acres just 
outside the eastern limits of the city. 



23 



XXXVII. 



ATLANTA — GEORGIA POLITICS — THE 
RECONSTRUCTION. 



FAILURE OF 



FROM the ashes of the great penitential conflagration in which the exigen- 
cies of war enveloped Atlanta, from the ruins of the thousand dwellings, 
factories, workshops, and railroad establishments totally destroyed in the blaze of 
1864, has sprung up a new, vigorous, awkwardly alert city, very similar in 
character to the mammoth groupings of brick and stone in the North-west 
There is but little that is distinctively Southern in Atlanta ; it is the antithesis of 
Savannah. There is nothing that reminds one of the North in the deliciously 
embowered chief city of Georgia, surrounded with its romantic moss-hung oaks, 
its rich lowlands, and its luxuriant gardens, where the magnolia, the bay, and the 
palmetto vie with one another in the exquisite inexplicable charm of their volup- 
tuous beauty. Atlanta has an unfinished air ; its business and residence streets 
are scattered along a range of pretty hills; but it is eminently modern and 
unromantic. The Western and Atlantic railway unites it with Chattanooga, 



BBsI 



J^Hlpf 




Sunset over Atlanta, Georgia 



running through a country which was scourged in bitterest fashion by the war ; 
the Georgia railroad connects it with Augusta; the Macon and Western with 
handsome and thriving Macon ; the Atlanta and W T est Point road to the town of 
West Point, Alabama, gives a continuous line to Montgomery ; and the new 



A REVIEW OF GEORGIAN POLITICS. 351 

Piedmont Air Line, which has opened up the whole of Northern Georgia, gives 
it new and speedy communication with the North via Charlotte, in North Caro- 
lina. Great numbers of Northern people have flocked to Atlanta to live since 
the time when General Pope's will was law, and when the Bullock administration 
was just arising out of the chaos of the constitutional convention. The removal 
of the State capital from Milledgeville to Atlanta also gave the renaissant city a 
good start, and the wonderful manner in which it drew trade and capital to it 
from all sides made it the envy of its sister Georgian cities. 

A brief review of the progress of politics in the State since Atlanta became 
its capital will aid in arriving at an understanding of the present social and politi- 
cal condition of the commonwealth. 

When the reconstruction policy of the General Government began, a large 
number of the citizens of Georgia declared for it, and among them was Mr. Bul- 
lock, subsequently Governor of the State. In the political campaign which 
ensued, the opposite faction, which totally repudiated the reconstruction acts, 
condescended to much proscription and denunciation, and numbers of Union 
men were driven from the State. It was out of this campaign that the Ku-Klux 
conspiracy, as manifested in Georgia, is supposed to have grown. Prominent 
Republicans received lugubrious letters containing pictures of coffins, and acts of 
violence were not wanting. Native Georgians, who were leading Republican 
officials, were hunted down and assassinated ; Republican meetings were dis- 
persed, not without slaughter; and it was manifest from the outset that there 
was to be a decided upsetting of the attempt to enforce the policy inaugurated 
by the war. But the Republican party was organized, and its Legislature, in 
which there were many negroes, went into session. 

The first trouble that occurred was due to a discussion of the question 
whether or not men who had held office previous to the war, and then had taken 
part in the rebellion, were eligible for the Legislature. The debate upon this 
matter was heated and angry, and the final decision was in favor of extreme 
liberality toward all who had fought on the Confederate side. Many of these 
were admitted to the State councils, and after a time, getting control of the 
middle-men, they had the Legislature in their hands. Their first act was to oust 
all the colored members — some thirty-six — and to proceed on the basis that a 
white man's government was the only one for Georgia. The expulsion of the 
negroes was corrected by act of Congress; and in 1869 the colored element was 
readmitted to the Legislature. After this, Bullock, who was the first Governor 
chosen under the operation of the reconstruction laws, had full sway for about 
two years. Some good laws were passed during that time, but the railroad 
legislation was the occasion of veritable disaster to the progress of reconstruction 
in Georgia. Bullock was in due time compelled to depart from the State, to save 
himself from imprisonment ; and the Democratic party, completely triumphant, 
now and then announces its convictions through the medium of Robert Toombs, 
who has been its leader, and, in some measure, its exponent for many years. It 
is not long since this gentleman, in a speech made at Atlanta in favor of a 
convention to revise the constitution of the State, made use of the following 



352 GOVERNOR BULLOCK. 

language : " Why, look at that miserable thing you call a constitution ! It com- 
mits you to all the lies of the revolution against you. It says your allegiance 
is first due to the Federal Government before it is due to your own State ? Do 
you believe that ? When you can wrench that from the constitution, do it ! " 

Under the administration of Governor Bullock, a system of internal improve- 
ment was inaugurated, theoretically granting State aid to naissant railroads in 
the proportion in which the companies building those roads aided themselves. 
But bonds were over-issued, and were negotiated by prominent bankers in New 
York city. The Brunswick and Albany railroad was the principal project. 
About $6,000,000 worth of bonds were actually issued during the two years, all 
of which went to the Brunswick and Albany railroad, with the exception of 
$600,000 granted to the Cartersville and Van West road. The party now in 
power has repudiated all the railroad bonds issued under Bullock's regime. The 
New York bankers have not suffered very much by this, but the repudiation will 
give the credit of the State a severe blow. 

The Governor, during these two years in which the reconstruction policy of 
Congress was upheld, seems to have had an agitated and miserable existence. He 
spent a great deal of time and money in Washington before he succeeded in pro- 
curing the legislation which restored the negroes to their places in the Legislature 
in 1 869. It is alleged that when he took the reins of government in Georgia he 
was worth no money, but that, a little time after he had assumed the office, he 
paid his debts, and became reasonably prosperous. But he was surrounded by 
an atmosphere of corruption, and it is difficult to say that he was individually 
dishonest. In his defense, which gives a very clear idea of the immense obsta- 
cles which wily and subtle men placed in his path, it is evident that he required 
the shrewdness of an archangel to march without stumbling. It was for the 
interest of the Democratic party in the State to make reconstruction unsuccess- 
ful, and toward that end they unceasingly toiled. 

The material on which one was compelled to work, to maintain the power of 
the reconstruction government in those days, was unreliable. One never knew 
when he was to be betrayed by the weak-kneed or ignorant legislators who were 
his own friends. Prominent State officials were applied to to contribute money 
for "election purposes," — i.e., for the purchase of votes. I was told by those 
who did not fear sincere contradiction, that as much as two thousand dollars was 
sometimes paid at that epoch for a single vote. Often in danger of losing his 
life, and always in danger of betrayal, the head of the newly organized party was 
haunted by horrors. 

The career of H. I. Kimball in Atlanta, and in various enterprises in the 
commonwealth, has not a little to do with the present condition of politics in 
Georgia. In 1865, Mr. Kimball made his appearance in the State, and began 
by perfecting arrangements for placing sleeping-cars on all the roads in the 
South. Atlanta was even then peering from beneath the ashes under which she 
had been buried, and was vaguely whispering prophecies of her future commer- 
cial greatness. The capital was likely to be removed from Milledgeville to that 
city as soon as a regular State government should be resumed, and Kimball, 



H. I. 



KIM BALI, THE OPERA HOUSE. 



353 




The State -House — Atlanta, Georgia. 



doubtless, saw that as readily as did any of the Atlantians. The Kimball- 
Ramsey-Pullman Sleeping-Car Company was the name of the organization with 
which he started ; and he intended, it is said, to get rich out of it by means of 
$300,000 franchise stock, which he was to have. This venture was not success- 
ful, and many people who furnished the money to buy the necessary cars were 
sufferers. His next venture was the "Atlanta Opera House." The original 
company which had contemplated erect- 
ing a mammoth block for an opera house, 
and for stores and public offices, had 
failed ; the unfinished building was con- 
sidered worth $115,000, but Mr. Kim- 
ball obtained possession of it for $33,000. 
This purchase gave him the means of 
raising money ; he finished the Opera 
House, furnishing it as a legislative edi- 
fice. At that time the Legislature was 
in session in the City Hall in Atlanta. 
The city rented Kimball's new building, 
as soon as it was completed, for a State- 
House. Kimball had fitted it up with 
$55,000, advanced to him, it is said, 
by Governor Bullock from the State 
funds. The Legislature entered the new Capitol, and no sooner had they assem- 
bled than Mr. Kimball besought them to buy it. They at first refused, but 
subsequently purchased it for $300,000. As soon as this was decided on, the 
$55,000 loaned by the Governor to Kimball were returned, thus presumably 
securing Governor Bullock from impeachment. 

Having prospered so well in the Opera House project, the ingenious Kimball 
conceived the scheme of the Kimball House, at present the largest hotel 
in Atlanta, and one of the largest in the Southern States. A bill was passed by 
the Legislature allowing an advance to the Brunswick and Albany railroad — 
that is to say, two acts allowed .Kimball, who was the contractor, to build the 
road, to draw respectively $12,000 and $15,000 per mile, before building each 
section of twenty miles. By this issue he obtained the funds with which to build 
the Kimball House. He constructed the first twenty miles of the Brunswick 
and Albany railroad in good faith, then gradually encroached, until there was no 
longer any semblance of adherence to the letter of the act, which naturally 
required him to build the road as fast as the money was advanced. Meantime 
the Democrats were vigorously attacking Governor Bullock, charging him with 
every kind of theft, and he was in a precarious situation, when he suddenly found 
that he had not a majority that he could count on in the Legislature. Then 
ensued a severe struggle on his part against the ousting which was threatened. 
Kimball continued to unfold superb schemes, and turn them to his private 
account. In the fall of 1871, Governor Bullock paid a visit to California, 
whence he was hurried home by the announcement that the Legislature was to 



354 THE FAILURE OF RECONSTRUCTION IN GEORGIA. 

meet in December. He returned ; surveyed the political field ; found that he 
was in imminent danger of being complicated and possibly impeached, and went 
North and resigned. Shortly after, Kimball disappeared from Atlanta and from 
his Southern field of operations, and the bubble burst. 

The State railroad, running from Atlanta northward to Chattanooga, had 
been leased under Bullock's administration. The Democrats, who now came into 
power, charged that the Governor was guilty of gross official misconduct in 
leasing the road, although it was done in obedience to an act of the Legislature, 
and they proceeded to prosecute every one who had been connected with the 
management of it under the Bullock regime. They based their charge against 
the Governor upon the theory that he was personally and pecuniarily interested 
in the road, as Kimball was one of the lessees, and the Governor was alleged to 
be Kimball's partner. This, however, the Governor expressly denies, showing 
that the road, which, for the twenty years from its building up to 1868, had been 
an expense to the State, and a fruitful source of political corruption, was made 
profitable under the lease system. The prosecutions by the Democratic party 
were characterized by a great deal of acerbity, and in one case the Supreme 
Court decided that much injustice was inflicted upon a prosecuted party. The 
Democratic Legislative Committee appointed to investigate the official conduct 
of the late Governor was in session seven months, and confined its final report 
mainly to denunciations of the Governor's course, on the supposition that he was 
Kimball's partner. They took complete control of the State Government, 
gloried in the repudiation of the various bonds issued from 1869 to 1871, and 
maintained that the reconstruction acts of Congress were " unconstitutional, 
revolutionary, null, and void." 

Certainly reconstruction is null and void in Georgia. It has been a complete 
failure there. That there have been instances of glaring injustice practiced on 
both sides no fair-minded man can for an instant doubt. The Republican admin- 
istration lasted scarcely three years ; and the legitimate results of the war were not 
maintained so long as that after 1868. Out of the 90,000 colored voters in the 
State, scarcely 30,000 vote to-day ; free schools are almost unknown outside the 
large cities and towns ; and there has not been a Republican inspector of election 
since the Democrats assumed power. To judge from the testimony of native 
Georgians who are Republicans, and who have never been suspected of any 
dishonesty or untruth, the negroes are very grossly intimidated; and the Ku-Klux 
faction still exists as a kind of invisible empire. This is naturally to be expected 
after the occurrences in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama ; it is the revul- 
sion from tyrannical ignorance and carpet -baggery; and may prove as baneful in 
its results as has its degraded and disreputable opposite. The Democrat of 
Georgia talks with all the more emphasis of a white man's government in his 
commonwealth, because he feels that there is a black man's government in 
a neighboring State ; if he has ever had any exaggerated fears as to a too free 
assumption of civil rights by his ex-slave, those fears are accented ten-fold 
since he has seen the real injustice practiced by negroes where they have 
attained supreme, unrestricted power. 



MILITARY DRILL FREE SCHOOLS. 355 

Both the whites and blacks in the State have large and effective military- 
organizations, and drill constantly, as if dumbly preparing for some possible 
future strife. The battalions of the white race still cling to the Confederate 
gray, in some cases ; the negro militiaman blossoms into a variety of gorgeous 
uniforms, I saw a company of blacks assembling in Atlanta ; they were good- 
looking, stalwart men, and went about their work with the utmost nonchalance, 
while here and there a white muttered between his teeth something unmis- 
takably like " d n niggers." There is a very large negro population in 

Atlanta and the surrounding country. 

But few traces of the war are now left in Atlanta. The residence streets 
have a smart, new air; many fine houses have been recently built, and their 
Northern architecture and trim gardens afford a pleasant surprise after the 
tumble -down, unpainted towns of which one sees so many in the South. The 
banks, the theatres, the public business blocks, the immense Kimball House, all 
have the same canny air — seem to be boasting of their tidy looks and prosperity 
to the countrymen who come into town to market. I strolled into the Capitol 
(the quondam Opera House, which Kimball sold the Legislature). In the office 
of the State Treasurer I encountered some gentlemen who seemed inclined 
to believe that the State would not suffer if all debts contracted under the Bul- 
lock regime were repudiated. One said that he could not inform me how much 
the State debt, as construed by the reconstructionists, was ; he reckoned no one 
knew ; the scoundrels who had contracted the debt had run away ; if they could 
lay hands on Bullock they would put him in the penitentiary. I found, every- 
where I went in the Capitol, a spirit of extreme bitterness prevailing against the 
departed carpet-baggers ; and all complained that the State affairs had been left 
in a wretched condition. 

The attempt to establish free common schools throughout Georgia has thus 
far resulted in failure. Prior to the war there was but little effort made for the 
education of the masses. A small sum was appropriated as the " indigent school 
fund," but the majority of the poorer classes in the back-country remained in 
dense ignorance. In the present State School Commissioner's office I was 
informed that there had been no common school open outside the large cities for 
some time. It was alleged that the school fund had been diverted to unlawful 
purposes during the "previous administration," and that the State had been 
much embarrassed by a debt of $300,000, incurred in prematurely putting 
schools into operation. There seems no doubt of a sincere desire on the part of 
the Georgia Conservatives to maintain free schools ; and it is, by the way, note- 
worthy that three of the Southern States that are Conservative in politics are 
leading all the others in education. Local taxation is the principal bugbear. 
The farmer dislikes to be taxed for schools ; he still has various absurd pre- 
judices ; thinks the common school a pauper institution, and gets angry if there 
is any talk of compulsory education. The school population of the State is about 
370,000, and the annual school revenue, derived from interest on bonds, from the 
poll tax, from taxes on shows, and from dividends on railroad stock, amounts to 
$280,000. This is, of course, ridiculously small, and, now that Georgia has 



356 MANUFACTURES OF ATLANTA. 

arrived once more at some degree of material prosperity, will, doubtless, be 
increased, and amends will be made for the shameful negligence which allowed 
the whole school machinery to stop and rust for a year. A praiseworthy but 
fruitless effort has recently been made in the Legislature to follow in the steps of 
Tennessee, by favoring local taxation, a limit to the amount of which is to be 
fixed, to guard against the creation of excessive taxes by negro votes ; and the 
Peabody fund is employed in aiding the proselyters who preach the cause of 
common school education in the back counties. The illiteracy in Georgia 
previous to i860 was alarming; the most moderate estimates showed that 
eighteen per cent, of the adult native white population could not even read ; and, 
in i860, when the State had a scholastic population of 236,454, only 94,687 
attended school. Prejudice is strong, but the free school will establish itself in 
Georgia, as everywhere South, in due time. I think that the mass of Georgians 
respect an educated negro, but are determined to make him do the work of 
educating himself. The negro needs a good general education, mainly because 
it will strengthen his character, and make him more independent. He is at 
present very easily intimidated with regard to his voting, and readily falls into 
corrupt practices in election time, because he does not consider the evil effects 
of such a course. 

The manufactures of Atlanta are not extensive ; there are some large rolling- 
mills, and a good deal of iron is brought down from the country to the north- 
ward, and worked over there. Of course there is a large cotton movement 
through the town ; and, in the late autumn, a journey along the railroad to Chat- 
tanooga discloses hundreds of teams toiling over the rough roads, bringing 
goodly stores of cotton bales to the stations. Journalism in Atlanta is vivacious 
and enterprising, and the New Era and the Herald are newspapers of metropoli- 
tan dimensions. The Governor's residence is a pretty building, on an ambitious 
avenue, where stand many handsome mansions ; the City Hall is quite imposing. 
Atlanta is the home of General John B. Gordon, one of the present United States 
senators, and a noted Confederate general. On the road from Atlanta to 
Augusta, and but fifteen miles from the capital, is the remarkable " Stone Mount- 
ain," a peak of solitary rock, 3,000 feet in height, and several miles in circum- 
ference. Near its top are the remains of an ancient fortification ; and along the 
sides there are little patches of soil, but from a distance the great pyramid stands 
out seemingly naked before the sky, its dark gray looming up angrily against the 
crystal vault. 

Northward, twenty miles from Atlanta, at the base of the Kenesaw mountain, 
lies the pretty little town of Marietta, once the location of a flourishing military 
academy, and now a summer resort for the well-to-do of Atlanta's 30,000 
residents. The country between Atlanta and Chattanooga seems as peaceful as 
if never a soldier had set his foot upon it ; yet it needs no stretch of memory to 
recall those wild days when the giant strategists, Sherman and Johnston, bitterly 
fought and fortified, and marched and countermarched during long months, from 
Dalton to the Chattahoochee river, whence Sherman pushed on against Hood 
and the desperate Confederate armies, whose command Hood had taken after the 



RAILROAD AND AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISE. 



357 



Richmond Government's fatal error, — the removal of Johnston, — until the great 
granary and storehouse of the Confederacy, with Atlanta for its centre, was con- 
quered by the Union arms. The " State," or Western and Atlantic road, once 
the object of so many hostile cavalry raids, does a thriving trade. At all the 
stations, in harvest time, are groups of jovial and contented agriculturists, white 
and black, their garments flecked with cotton. Near Marietta, at Roswell, there 
are flourishing cotton factories. Allatoona and Resaca, memorable for the scenes 
of 1864, lie in a broken, picturesque and fertile country; the lands along the 
creeks are especially rich. Dalton, the junction of the " State," the branch of 
the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, and the Selma, Rome and Dalton 
railroads, is a flourishing grain depot for Atlanta ; here and there on the adjacent 
mountains may be seen fast-crumbling remnants of Johnston's fortifications, 
erected a decade ago. At Cartersville, fifty miles from Atlanta, fine crops of 
wheat and cotton are raised ; large quarries of slate and marble have been opened 
and worked successfully ; and in the vicinity manganese has been found. 




An Up-Country Cotton-Press. 



XXXVIII. 

SAVANNAH, THE FOREST CITY— THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF 
GEORGIA — MATERIAL PROGRESS OF THE STATE. 



THE transition from the brisk air and reddish uplands of Northern Georgia 
to the sluggish atmosphere and sombre voluptuousness of the lowlands of 
the coast, is startling. One seems to have come upon another country, to have 
passed beyond seas, so great is the difference. The Savannah river, up which 
you sail, returning from Florida some radiant morning, seems to you to have no 
affinity with the Savannah which, far among the Northern mountains, you saw 
born of the frolicsome or riotous streamlets forever leaping and roaring in the 
passes or over mighty falls. Here it is broad, and deep, and strong, and, near 
the bluff on which the city stands, it is freighted with ships from European ports 




View on the Savannah River near Savannah, Georgia. 

and from the Northern cities of our own coast. The moss-hung oaks, the mag- 
nolias, the orange-trees, the bays, the palmettoes, the olives, the stately shrubs 
of arbor vitae, the Cape myrtles, the oleanders, the pomegranates, the lovely 
japonicas, astonish the eyes which have learned to consider a more Northern 
foliage as Georgian. Very grand in their way were the forests of pine, with 



THE FOUNDING OF SAVANNAH. 



359 




their sombre aisles, and the mournful whispers of the breeze stealing through 
them ; but here is the charm of the odorous tropical South, which no one can 
explain. Yet it is not here that one must look for the greatest wealth of the 
State ; for Middle Georgia is, perhaps, 
the richest agricultural region in the 
commonwealth, and the hundreds of 
farms along the western boundary are 
notable instances of thorough and 
profitable culture. 

But here at Savannah began the 
existence of Georgia; here it was that 
Oglethorpe planted his tiny colony 
hardly a century and a-half ago ; here, 
on the pine-crowned bluff, where an 
Indian tribe dwelt in a village called 
Yamacraw, he disembarked the adven- 
turers who had come with him from 
England, under the sanction of the 
charter accorded by George the Sec- 
ond, and in due time established a 
group of tents defended by a battery 

Of Cannon. From this humble begin- General Oglethorpe, the Founder of Savannah. 

ning Savannah soon grew to the proportions of a town, and was laid out 
into squares. As the colonists had first landed on the shore of South Carolina, 
and been very kindly received by the Carolinians, they named the streets of the 
new settlement after their benefactors, — Bull, Drayton, Whitaker, St. Julian and 
Bryan, — and some of them still bear those names. Savannah, in 1734, was a little 
assemblage of squares in a clearing in the pine forest. The inhabitants locked 
themselves into their cabins at night, because the alligators strolled through the 
town, seeking whom they might devour ; and the Indians, who now and then 
threatened to "dig up the hatchet" when the colonists encroached, kept all in 
constant alarm. Two years later, the distinguished founder of Methodism, John 
Wesley, preached his first sermon in America in Savannah. 

An English gentleman who visited the colony in this same year tells us that 
" the houses are built at a pretty large distance from one another, for fear of fire; 
the streets are very wide, and there are" great squares left at proper spaces for 
markets and other conveniences." To this fortunate early arrangement the town 
owes its beauty to-day. No other American city has such wealth of foliage, 
.such charming seclusion, such sylvan perfection, so united with all the conveni- 
ence and compactness of a large commercial centre. The trustees of the colony, 
appointed under the royal charter, made a strict agrarian law, which divided the 
original town into two hundred and forty "freeholds; " the town land covered 
twenty-four square miles, every forty houses (each house being located on tracts 
of land of exactly the same size) making a ward; each ward had a constable, and 
under him were four tithing-men. Every ten houses made a tithing; and to each 



36o 



GEORGIA OF THE PAST. 



tithing there was a mile square, "divided into twelve lots, besides roads." Every 
freeholder of the tithing had a lot or farm of forty- five acres there, and two lots 
were reserved by the trustees. Great efforts were used to make Georgia, as the 
new colony was called, after the English king who had granted the charter, " a 
silk and wine-growing country ; " but after protracted trials the colonists gave up 
their dreams of speedily realizing immense fortune, and set to work at more 
practical schemes. 

Savannah, escaping, as by miracle, from Indian malice and the tyranny of the 
"trustees," who were of small benefit to the rest of the settlers, grew and flour- 
ished until John Reynolds came out from England as Governor in 1754, the 
trustees having resigned. The colonists welcomed him joyously at first, but 
afterward regretted it, for he was not specially interested in them. He allowed 
the town to fall into decay, and, notwithstanding the' fact that the General 
Assembly of Georgia had met at Savannah in 1750, even considered the ques- 
tion of the removal of the capital. This was not effected ; a new Governor was 
sent over, but the people were rapidly becoming independent, and the " Stamp 
Act" put the same fever into their blood that stirred the pulses of their cousins 
in Massachusetts. It is curious to note, in view of later events, that Savannah 
sent to the Old Bay State much of the powder used in the defense of 
Bunker Hill. 

Among the early excitements of Savannah was the trouble with the Span- 
iards in Florida, which finally culminated in open war. Spain, with her wonted 
arrogance, had firmly bidden the Georgians quit their newly established homes ; 
but Spanish bravado did not frighten them. Anglo-Georgian and Hispano- 
Floridian fortified one against the other; the same Spanish intrigue, which was 

at work among the thousands of 
negroes in South Carolina, was active 
among the Indians in Georgia. When 
at last England and Spain went to 
war, Oglethorpe and his colonists 
played an important part in 1740, 
and penetrated to the very walls of St. 
Augustine in Florida, though they did 
not succeed in taking it. 

Although last settled of the old 
thirteen States of the Union, neither 
Georgia nor her chief city was back- 
ward in accepting the issues of the 
revolution. A Georgia schooner was 
the first commissioned American ves- 
sel, and made the first capture of the 
war — sixteen thousand pounds of 
powder. Savannah revolted against 
its royal Governor early in 1776, and 
The Pulaski Monument in Savannah, Georgia. [Page 3 6i.] imprisoned him; and the next year 




A HISTORY-PICTURE SAVANNAH IN THE REVOLUTION. 



36l 



the convention, which formed the State constitution, met in the city. Toward 
the close of 1778, the British, after a savagely disputed battle, captured the 
city; a brutal soldiery shot and bayoneted many citizens in the streets, and 
imprisoned others on board the English ships. British rule, with all the rigor of 
military law, was enforced until an evac- 
uation was rendered expedient by the 
success of American arms elsewhere. 
There is one history-picture which 
the memory of Savannah's trials during 
the revolution should ever bring to 
mind, a picture which has in it the 
sparkle of French color, and which 
may serve as a noble remembrancer 
of French gallantry and generosity. 
In the dull and dreadful days of 1779, 
when English rule had become all but 
intolerable, a superb fleet anchored off 
Tybee one day in September, and the 
amazed English saw the French colors 
displayed above twenty ships of the 
line and eleven frigates, commanded 
by Count D'Estaing, sent by the King 
of France to aid the struggling Ameri- 
cans. Five thousand Of the best A Spanish Dagger -Tree— Savannah. 

soldiers of the French army, united with such as the American Government could 
muster, laid vigorous siege to the town ; troops were landed, and lively attacks 
were made upon the British positions by the combined forces ; a strong bombard- 
ment was kept up for some time ; but the besiegers were finally compelled to 
withdraw, leaving the unfortunate town to the mercies of the enraged English. 

In this long and brave assault, which lasted nearly two months, the chival- 
rous Pulaski, who had devoted himself to the cause of American liberty, lost 
his life ; and there, fighting to save the beloved flag which he had grown to 
cherish more than life, perished Sergeant Jasper, who had already immortalized 
himself by keeping the American colors, at; imminent risk of death, still waving 
over the battlements of Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, in the thick of a 
terrific bombardment. 

Savannah was, in her early history, one of the most patriotic of American 
towns. She not only produced men renowned for bravery and true chivalric 
qualities, but she took every occasion to demonstrate her faith 1 in the Union. 
She received the new President, Washington, with joyous enthusiasm, gave 
Lafayette an overwhelming welcome, and during his visit laid the corner-stones 
of two handsome monuments, which are to-day counted among the city's treas- 
ures — those to Pulaski and General Greene. 

"The Forest City," as the Georgians affectionately call it, is situated on a 
sandy plain, only fifty feet above sea- level, and eighteen miles from the mouth 




362 



THE "FOREST CITY" — ITS CLIMATE THE LEVEE. 



of the Savannah river. From the northern bank stretch away the vast lowland 
rice-fields of South Carolina, once under perfect cultivation, but now only here 
and there cultured, and serving mainly as the homes of a mass of ignorant and 
dissolute negroes. The city to-day is simply the amplification of the old plan 
of Oglethorpe and the trustees. It is divided by many wide streets and lanes 
which intersect at right, angles, and there are many large squares at regular 
distances. There is little noise of wheels or clatter of hoofs in the upper town ; 
the streets are filled with a heavy black sand over which dray and carriage alike 
go noiselessly ; one wanders in a kind of a dream through the pretty squares, so 
gay in their dress of flowering shrubs and tall and graceful trees ; it is a city 
through which he moves, yet as tranquil and beautiful as a village. The winter 
climate is delicious ; the cold weather lasts hardly six weeks ; many flowers 
bloom in the open air from November to April ; in February the jessamine and 
the peach-tree are radiant with blossoms ; and a wholesome sea-breeze continu- 
ally sweeps inland. In summer, that is, from April to November, there is a mild 
malaria in the atmosphere, but it has been much reduced during the last quarter 
century, and the visitations of yellow fever have been rare. Savannah certainly 
possesses the advantage of an equable temperature, for during ten months of 

the year, the range is from yo to 92 
degrees. The mean temperature is the 
same as that of Gibraltar, Bermuda, 
Palermo, Shanghai, or Sydney. The 
Northern invalids who have been 
helped by a winter or two in Savannah 
number hundreds; and many persons 
traveling to Florida in search of re- 
stored health, have become so fascin- 
ated with the Forest City as to prefer 
stopping there. 

The levee of Savannah is as pictur- 
esque, though not as extensive, as 
that of New Orleans. Looking down 
from the bluff, along whose summit 
" the Bay," the principal commercial 
avenue, runs, one sees a forest of 
masts ; a mass of warehouses, not 
unhandsomely grouped ; cotton-presses, 
surrounded by active, chattering toil- 
ers ; long processions of mule-teams, 
crowds of sailors talking in every 
known language, rice-mills, high mys- 
terious stairways, with wondrous effects 
of light and shade on their broad steps, 
winding walls, and railroad wharves. 
"Looking down from the bluff"— Savannah. Along the water-front the business 




ALONG THE LEVEES TRIBUTARY RAILWAYS. 



363 



blocks are so constructed that they rise above the bluff, and are connected with 
Bay street by means of platforms and balconies from which one can look down, 
as from house-tops, on the busy life of the port. The few buildings which the 
great fire of 1820 spared give an air of quaintness and age to the whole. 

As we walked, day by day, through the Savannah streets, late in autumn, 
we were amazed at the masses of cotton bales piled everywhere. They lined 
the commercial avenues for hundreds and hundreds of rods; down by the water- 
side they were heaped in mammoth piles, and the processions of drays seemed 
endless. The huge black ships swallowed bale after bale ; the clank of the 
hoisting- crane was heard from morning till night. At the great stone Custom- 
House the talk was of cotton; at the quaint old "Exchange," in front of which 
Sherman reviewed his army in 1865, cotton was the theme; and in all the offices 
from end to end of long and level Bay street, we encountered none save busy 
buyers and factors, worshiping the creamy staple, and gossiping rapturously of 
" middlings " low, and profits possible. 




lil 



yiiiim 



Iff'' - ' '■ "' 1 1 




a^llltj I [ 



'The huge black ships swallowed bale after bale." 



Savannah's progress since the war has not been less remarkable than that of 
the whole State. The recuperation of its railroad system has been astonishing. 
Sherman's army, in its march to the sea, destroyed one hundred and ten miles of 
the Georgia Central railroad track between Savannah and Macon, and thirty-nine 
miles between Savannah and Augusta. The military authorities returned the 
road to the control of its directors, June 22, 1865, and early in 1866 it was 
reconstructed so as to answer the public demand. This immense corporation at 
present operates in its interest, with its tributaries, 1,545 miles of , railway. It 
extends from Savannah to Macon, thence by the South-western and Muscogee 
road to the thriving cotton-spinning town of Columbus, thence by the Columbus 
and Opelika route to Opelika, a brisk manufacturing town in Alabama, thence to 
Montgomery, and through Selma gets an unbroken rail communication with the 
Mississippi river at Vicksburg. This, it is expected, will be the connecting point 



364 



THE GEORGIA CENTRAL THE ATLANTIC AND GULF ROAD. 



of the Southern Pacific route with the roads leading to the Atlantic coast. The 
Central's connections also give Savannah direct communication with New York 
and Memphis via the Atlanta and Chattanooga route, and connection at Augusta 
with the South Carolina road. From Macon it sends out another arm to 



grasp Atlanta, — the Macon and 




An old Stairway on the Levee at Savannah. 



Western road, — and there, also, connects 
with the Georgia railroad to Eufaula, 
Alabama, whence, by steamers on the 
Chattahoochee river, it secures an 
outlet to the Gulf of Mexico. It is 
interested in a host of small local 
lines, and has, indeed, spread an al- 
most perfect network over the State, 
contributing in the highest degree to 
the prosperity of Georgia, by the 
superb facilities which it has afforded 
for transportation of products. On 
its trunk lines, during harvest, immense 
cotton-trains run night and day, bring- 
ing to Savannah the fleeces plucked 
from the fields of Georgia, Alabama, 
and Tennessee. The Central has long 
been a banking as well as a railroad 
company, and has always paid large 
dividends. The railroad interest in 
Georgia is secondary to none other 
but agriculture. The various compa- 
nies, great and small, are managed 
with much ability, and new projects 
for local and through routes are rarely 



received with disfavor. Savannah is somewhat excited over the possibilities of 
the completion of the Southern Pacific route to San Diego, in California, as the 
surveys have shown her to be the nearest Eastern port on an air line from the 
Pacific terminus.* 

The Atlantic and Gulf railroad is another important feeder to Savannah. It is 
the main thoroughfare connecting Savannah with Florida, Southern and South- 
western Georgia, and Eastern Alabama, and extends to Bainbridge' on Flint river, 
237 miles from Savannah. From Lawton to Live Oak runs a branch road con- 
necting the Florida system with that of Georgia — at present the only Northern 
outlet for the dwellers in the flowery peninsula. A road from Macon crosses the 
Atlantic and Gulf route fifty-six miles from Savannah, and gives Brunswick, 
which was at one time expected to be a great city, an important outlet by land. 
The Savannah and Charleston railroad, completely destroyed during the war, has 

* Savannah would be, by shortest distance from San Diego, 2,070 miles; Charleston, 2,184; 
Norfolk, 2,331. The completion of a Southern Pacific railway will certainly add immensely to 
the commercial importance of Savannah. 



STEAMSHIP LINES EXPORTS OF UPLAND COTTON. 



365 




The Custom - House at Savannah. 



been rebuilt, but is so poorly stocked that it is a penance to ride over it, although 
the lowland scenery through which it runs is among the most exquisite in the 
Atlantic States. The grand canebrakes, unsubdued and seemingly impene- 
trable, extending on either side the track for miles ; the stretch of lovely field, 
with the fawn and rabbit bounding 
across it; the odorous forest, with 
its stately avenues of pine ; the little 
villages of the gatherers of naval 
stores ; the mossy boughs and tangled 
vines; the muddy-colored rivers, and 
the marshes filled with wildest masses 
of decaying vegetation — all add to 
the charm. 

The numerous steamship lines 
from Savannah to Liverpool, New 
York, Philadelphia, and Boston, carry 
away enormous quantities of cotton, 
and if the needed improvements at the 
mouth of the river were made, the 
commerce of the port would be very 
much increased. The entrance is considered one of the easiest on the 
Southern coast, the bar having a depth of nineteen feet of water upon it at 

mean low tide, and a rise of 



seven feet on the flood; but it is 
now necessary that the obstruc- 
tions placed in the stream in 
war time be removed, and that 
extensive dredging be accom- 
plished. 

The total amount of upland 
cotton exported from Savannah 
in American vessels, from July 
1, 1865, to June 30, 1872, was 
704,373 bales, or 323,202,812 
pounds, valued at $59,537,460; 
total amount of sea-island cot- 
ton exported in American ves- 
sels, 12,437 bales, valued at 
$2,062,576. In foreign ves- 
sels during the same period, 
1,292,979 bales of upland cot- 

View in Bonaventure Cemetery— Savannah. [Page 368.] ton, Valued at $124,562,590, 

and 21,899 bales of sea-island cotton, valued at $4,057,708, were exported. . 
The coastwise trade was also very large, amounting to 1,539,560 bales of upland 
and 40,574 bales of sea- island cotton. 

24 





■;' : , '■■■ '■ ■ • ' , '■ Mi '■ 



m. 







366 



VALUE OF EXPORTS AND IMPORTS SINCE 1866. 



The value of both exports and imports since 1866 has been as follows: 



1867 $41,225,488 

1868 50,226,209 

1869 49,152,639 



1870 $58,850,198 

1871 64,893,892 

1872 68,100,164 



and in 1873 they did not fall short of the amount in 1872. Savannah and 
Charleston are rivals in the cotton trade, and the newspapers of the two cities 
fight at every opportunity with an eager fierceness. Savannah is now receiving 
more than 700,000 bales of cotton yearly. The crop of Georgia alone, I should 
say, is rather more than that in successful years ; and, at the rate at which the 
production in the regions tributary to the Forest City is increasing, she will 
soon rank with New Orleans. There is an enormous disparity between the 
amount of exports and imports; most of the vessels which enter the port of 

Savannah are compelled to go there in 



ballast. If cotton were taken away 
from the town, there would be little 
vivacity left. The aim of the port is 
to control the cotton of South Caro- 
lina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, 
and it is entered in the lists as a for- 
midable competitor with Charleston for 
supremacy. A flourishing cotton ex- 
change, earnest merchants and manu- 
facturers, and certain advantages of 
location, are doing much to place Sa- 
vannah first among the Southern At- 
lantic cities. 

There is a constant drain of emi- 
gration from the poorer districts of 
Georgia, as from Alabama, and, indeed, 
from most of the cotton States. Hun- 
dreds of poor Georgians, unable to 
make a living from the worn-out soil, 
under the new order of things, fly to 
Texas. Yet Georgia certainly does not 
grow weaker. Her material progress 
is in the highest degree encouraging. 




The Independent Presbyterian Church — Savannah. 
[Page 369.] 



Her valuation, in 1858, counting the slaves as capital, was over $600,000,000; 
the revolution decreased it to $148,122,525, on a gold basis, in 1866. The 
commonwealth had been racked literally to pieces by the invasion and support 
of a merciless army. She was weighted down so heavily that recovery seemed 
impossible. Yet she grew in strength and prosperity year by year thenceforward. 
In 1872 she returned a valuation in gold of $213,160,808, a substantial increase 
in six years of nearly $75,000,000 in currency. In other words she increased 
her wealth by about the total gold value of all her lands — some 30,000,000 acres. 



Georgia's material progress — the railway mania. 



\6 7 



This liberal increase was accomplished despite a decrease in the number of 
laborers, for although the aggregate population had increased since the war, 
there were only 114,999 laborers reported in 1871, while in 1866 there were 
139,988. In 1872 the number had still further decreased, and it is estimated 
that in six years near- 
ly 30,000 laborers 
have been lost to the 
State.* But the im- 
proved methods of 
culture, and the use 
of powerful fertilizers, 
as well as the influence 
of an energetic spirit 
which perhaps distin- 
guishes the Georgian 
above his neighbors of 
the other States, have 
enabled the lessened 
number of workers to 
do what few dared to 
predict as possible. It 
is estimated that in six 
years and a-half the 

increase in the total View in Forsyth Park -Savannah. [Page 

value of the property of the State has been forty-four per cent. It is to be 
regretted that the legislators of a commonwealth which has shown itself capable 
of such an elastic rebound from ruin and misfortune should embarrass their 
future prospects by ominously talking of repudiation. Now that the majority 
of the plantations are in good condition; now that the farming implements 
destroyed in the war have been replaced ; now that the quantity of live stock 
in' all sections has been nearly doubled since 1867; and that the planters look 
confidently forward to the time when Georgia shall produce a million bales 
yearly, — in spite of all the drawbacks and failures of an imperfect and vexa- 
tious labor system, — it is hardly wise to threaten the State's credit with 
destruction, because of the irregularities which the government inaugurated 
by reconstruction brought into existence. With caution in future, and with 
some check upon the multitude of railway schemes constantly proposed, Georgia 
can easily carry all the debt she has contracted, until she finds herself able 
to discharge it honorably. Railroad building and speculation have always 
been passions dear to the Georgian heart ; and, within thirty years, more than 
$40,000,000 were invested in lines built in the State. 

So feverish has become the railroad mania that there is a class who are in 
favor of an inhibition of State aid to works of internal' improvement, and who 

* The population of Georgia, in i860, was 1,057,286, divided into 591,550 whites, 2500 free 
and 462,198 slave blacks. In 1870, the population was 1,200,609; number of blacks, 545,132. 




368 



AUTUMN-TIME IN SAVANNAH — BONAVENTURE. 



would be glad to see a clause to that effect inserted in the Constitution. It is 
expected that in due time a convention will be called for the purpose of altering 
the Constitution in many ways, as the Georgia Conservative press and politicians 
are clamorous for one to take the place of " the instrument dignified with that 
name and forced upon the people by Federal intervention." 

Autumn-time in Georgia, when harvest is nearly over, is brisk and redolent 
of inspiring gayety. In the last days of November the towns and cities are filled 
with the planters from hundreds of miles round about ; money flows plentifully ; 
at Savannah there are agricultural fairs, races, reviews of the fine military organ- 
izations which the city boasts, balls, and wassail. The halls of the Screven and 
the Pulaski, Savannah's two prime hotels, echo to the cheery laugh of the tall 
and handsome planter, as well as to the cough of the Northern invalid. On a 
bright day in December, when a stiff breeze is blowing through the odorous 
foliage, Savannah presents an aspect of gayety and vivacity hardly Southern 
in character. Elegant equipages dash along the hard white roads leading to the 
pretty river-side resort known as " Thunderbolt," or the sombre, mystical aisles 
of the " Bonaventure " cemetery. Where the Tatnall family once lived in regal 
splendor, Savannah now buries its dead. There are many fine monuments in 

the Forest Cemetery, but 
no marble can vie in beauty 
and grandeur with the 
mighty yet graceful live 
oaks which spread their 
arched boughs and superb 
foliage. 

From Bonaventure one 
may look out across the 
lowlands traversed by estu- 
aries, along which steamers 
crawl on the inland route 
to Florida; or may stray 
into cool pineries ; and, re- 
turning, find himself beneath 
such lofty domes, or such 
broad and majestic aisles, 
with pavements of tesselated 
sun and shade, that he will 
start with surprise to dis- 
cover, upon awaking from 
his day-dream, that he is 
"'^IK '£*■* -=su-==^^"3 a ^^i:-^L.*"' v if>^" >,> not wandering in some giant 

"Forsyth park contains a massive fountain." I Page 369.] Cathedral. The inhabitants 

of Savannah have the delights of sea-bathing and sea air within a few miles of 
town at such pretty resorts as the "Thunderbolt," the Isle of Hope, Beaulieu, 
Montgomery, and White Bluff. 





^^^^9*mfB^^^^*i^^^^t^^sW' 



FORSYTH PARK THE SAVANNAH POLICE. 



369 



From the steeple of the venerable Exchange one can get, here and there, 
glimpses of Savannah's especial curiosities. On Bull street he can see the 
Masonic Hall, where the ordinance of secession was passed in 1861 ; and, pierc- 
ing the foliage, the tall spire of the Independent Presbyterian Church, or St. 
John's, or the Ionic proportions of Christ Church, in the parish over which John 
Wesley was once rector ; and may look down into parks where flashing fountains 
scatter their spray-jets upon lovely beds of flowers. Forsyth park contains a 
massive fountain, around which, as in continental cities, troops of children and 
their nurses are always straying. In Monument square rises a handsome shaft 
to the memory of Greene and Pulaski. Monument square is one of the principal 
centres in Savannah, and around it are grouped the hotels and the State Bank 
edifice; the Bank itself exists no longer. The Pulaski monument, a beautiful 
marble shaft, surrounded by a figure of the Goddess of Liberty, ornaments still 



another square. Wandering 
up Bull, or Drayton, or along 
Broad streets, one sees shop, 
theatre, public hall, market, 
luxurious private dwellings, 
many-balconied and cool, and 
fountain and monument; yet 
feels around him the tranquillity 
and beauty of the Southern 
forest. Each one of the 30,000 
inhabitants of Savannah should 
carry a benediction in his heart 
for the founders of the colony, 
who gave Savannah such scope 
for gardens and parks, for fount- 
ains and shaded avenues. 




A Savannah Sergeant 
of Police. 



The municipal control of the 
town thus pleasantly situated 
is very nearly perfect. The 
police corps is a military or- 
ganization, clothed in Confed- 
erate gray, subject to strict 
discipline, armed with rifles, 
revolvers and sabres, and occu- 
pying a handsome garrison 
barracks in a central location. 
It is one of the prides of the 
city, and General Anderson, 
an ex- United States and Con- 
federate officer, keeps it in 
perfect discipline. Only now 
and then, in the troublesome 



days of reconstruction, did it come into collision with the factions at election time. 
One policeman wanders over each ward every night. There is but little violation 
of law, save in the brawls incidental to a seaport, and the larcenies arising from 
the undeveloped moral consciousness of the freedman. The negroes no longer 
have any voice whatever in political matters, and are not represented in the City 
Government. The registration law in the city, which was in force at the outset of 
reconstruction, has been abolished. There are only 400 negro voters registered 
in the city. The banking capital of Savannah was decreased from $12,000,000 
to $3,000,000 by the war, but the city owes comparatively little money, has a 
valuation of $16,000,000, and manages to do much business on small capital. 

Education in the city, and in the thickly settled county of Chatham surround- 
ing it, is making far better progress than in the back-country. In 1866 the Board 
of Education in Savannah was made a corporate body, and a most excellent 
system of schools for white children was inaugurated, to which have now been 
added several schools for the colored children. The Peabody Fund does its good 
work there, as elsewhere. Twenty-five hundred white children attend the ses- 



37o 



EDUCATION IN SAVANNAH. 



sions, but only 400 or 500 out of the 3,000 negro children in Savannah have been 
accorded facilities. There is a good deal of absurd prejudice in Savannah against 
the colored man yet, and, although the Board seems inclined to do its duty, the 
citizens do not urge any effective effort to raise Sambo out of his ignorance. 
Savannah is quite rich in private, educational, charitable and literary institutions, 




General Sherman's Head -quarters — Savannah. 

prominent among which are the Union Society and the Female Asylum for 
Orphans, the former on the site of the Orphan House which Whitfield established 
in 1740. The Georgia Historical and Medical Societies are flourishing, and of 
excellent reputation. The house occupied by General Sherman as his head- 
quarters, after the capture of Savannah during the late war, is still pointed out 
to visitors. 



XXXIX. 

GEORGIAN AGRICULTURE "CRACKERS" COLUMBUS MACON, j 

SOCIETY ATHENS THE COAST. 

IT is not without some little bitterness that a Georgia journalist recently 
wrote : " A Georgia farmer uses a Northern axe-helve and axe to cut 
up the hickory growing within sight of his door; ploughs his fields with a 
Northern plough ; chops out his cotton with a New England hoe ; gins his 
cotton upon a Boston gin; hoops it with Pennsylvania iron; hauls it to mar- 
ket in a Concord wagon, while the little grain that he raises is cut and prepared 
for sale with Yankee implements. We find the Georgia •housewife cooking 
with an Albany stove ; and even the food, especially the luxuries, are imported 
from the North. Georgia's fair daughters are clothed in Yankee muslins and 
decked in Massachusetts ribbons and Rhode Island jewelry." 

Yea, verily ! Throughout the cotton States this statement holds true. 
In the interior cotton districts of Georgia there is often a great deal of 
pecuniary distress, because the condition of the market or the failure of the 
crop presses sorely on those who have given no care to raise anything for 
self-support, and who have staked their all on cotton. Diversified industry 
would make of Georgia, in twenty years, a second New York ; for even in 
her present ill-organized condition she actually makes great progress. The 
creation of manufacturing centres like Columbus, Macon, Albany, Thomaston, 
Augusta, Atlanta, Marietta, Athens, and Dalton is encouraging, but much 
remains to be done. Only about five millions of dollars are invested in the 
manufacture of cotton and woolen goods in the State as yet, and the grand 
water power of the Chattahoochee still remains but little employed. Agricul- 
ture must, therefore, be the main stay of the commonwealth, and the pros- 
pect is, on the whole, encouraging. 

The present cash value of the farms in Georgia is considerably more than 
one hundred million dollars, and might be doubled by something like syste- 
matic and thorough cultivation. The number of small farms is steadily increasing, 
and the negroes have acquired a good deal of land which, in the cotton sec- 
tions, they recklessly devote entirely to the staple, with an improvidence and 
•carelessness of the future which is bewildering to the foresighted observer. 
They are fond of the same pleasures which their late masters give themselves 
so freely — hunting, fishing, and lounging; pastimes which the superb forests, 
the noble streams, the charming climate minister to very strongly. In the 
lower part of the State, in the piney woods and swamps, the inhabitants are 
indolent, uneducated, complaining and shiftless. They are all of the same 



37 2 



THE GEORGIA "CRACKERS." 



stamp as the old woman who explained to a hungry and thirsty traveler that 
they could n't give him any milk, " because the dog was dead ! " Applying 
his perceptive powers to this singular remark, he discovered that the defunct 
dog had been wont to drive up the cows to be milked at eventide, and that 

since his death it had not 
occurred to any of the 
family to go themselves 
in search of the kine. 
People who have plenty 
of cattle, and might raise 
the finest beef and mut- 
ton, rarely see milk or 
butter, and wear out then- 
systems with indigestible 
pork and poor whiskey. 
Their indolence, igno- 
rance, and remoteness 
from any well - ordered 
farming regions are the 
excuses. These are the 
sallow and lean people 
who always feel " tolla- 
ble," but who never feel 
well; a people of dry fibre 
and coarse existence, yet 
not devoid of Avit and 
good sense. 

The Georgia "cracker"" 
is eminently shiftless ; he 

A Pair of Georgia "Crackers." Seems to fancy that lie 

was born with his hands in his pockets, his back curved, and his slouch 
hat crowded over his eyes, and does his best to maintain this attitude forever. 
Quarrels, as among the lower classes generally throughout the South, grow 
into feuds, cherished for years, until some day, at the cross-roads, or the country 
tavern, a pistol or a knife puts a bloody and often a fatal end to the difficulty. 
There is, in all the sparsely settled agricultural portion of Georgia, too much 
popular vengeance, too much taking the law into one's own hands; but there 
is a gradual growth of opinion against this, and even now it is by no means 
so pronounced as in Kentucky and some other more northward States. The 

" d n nigger" is usually careful to be unobtrusive in quarrels with white 

men, as the rural Caucasian has a kind of subdued thirst for negro gore, which,, 
when once really awakened, is not readily appeased. Yet, on the whole, consid- 
ering the character which the revolution has assumed in Georgia since the fall of 
the reconstruction government there, it is astonishing that the two races get on 
so well together as they do. 




COLUMBUS AND ITS MANUFACTURES. 



373 



Columbus, on the border of Alabama, separated from that State by the Chat- 
tahoochee river, which gives it an outlet to the Gulf, through Florida, is a lively, 
thriving town, which must one day rival Lowell or Manchester, because its water 
power is exceptionally fine. The river, some distance above the city, flows 
through a rugged and beautiful ravine, where the best building stone is to 
be had. It is said by competent authorities that along the stream, within two 
miles of the city, there are sixty sites, each large enough for the establishment of 
a capacious factory. Columbus impressed me more favorably than any other 
manufacturing town I had seen in the far South. It lies right at the centre of the 
cotton belt, is pierced by six important railways, receives about 130,000 cotton 
bales yearly, and in the mills of the Columbus Manufacturing, and Eagle and 
Phoenix Companies, employs hundreds of women and children. The streets are 
wide and cheery ; the shops and stores quite fine ; the residences pretty ; the 
little town of Girard across the river, built by the mill proprietors as a home for 
their operatives, is charming ; there is an aspect of life, and energy, and content 
in the place strongly contrasted with the dead and stagnant towns, of which I had 
seen so many. True, there were hosts of idle negroes roosting in shady places 
about the squares, and under the porticoes, but they are found everywhere in the 
South. The managers of the cotton-mills will not employ them in their estab- 
lishments. When I asked one of the superintendents why not, he smiled quaintly, 
and said : " Put a negro in one of those rooms with a hundred looms, and the 
noise would put him to sleep." To which, never having seen the "man and 
brother " under the specified circumstances, I could, of course, make no answer. 

Columbus has direct water communication with Texas, the great wool market 
of the future, and could supply woolen- mills very readily and cheaply. The 
Columbus manufactur- 
ers claim that a bale 
of cotton can be man- 
ufactured twenty-two 
dollars cheaper there 
than in or near Boston, 
and that their labor is 
thirty per cent, cheap- 
er, while they are never 
subject to obstructions 
from ice.* The opera- 
tives in the mills were 
evidently saving mo- 
ney, and their houses 
and gardens were 
models of neatness and The Ewk and PhcEnix Cotton - Mi ' ls -c°iumbus, Georgia. 

comfort. After riding all day through regions where the log- cabin was oftener 
seen than the frame-house, and where the forests still hold possession of nine- 

* The first cotton factory established at Macon has sometimes divided twenty-one per cent, 
yearly, and is gradually accumulating a very large surplus fund. 




374 MACON SOCIETY AND POLITICS. 

tenths of the land, it was refreshing to come upon a town of such energy, activity 
and prospects as Columbus. 

The journey from Savannah to Macon carries one well out of the lowlands 
into a high, rolling country, admirably suited to cotton- raising. Macon is the 
site of the annual Georgia fair, which, late in autumn, all the planters attend. 
The smaller towns around about it on the various lines of rail are not very prom- 
ising in appearance. The unpainted houses seem deserted until one sees half- 
a-dozen negro children pop their heads above the window-sills, and the "judge," 
and the " colonel," and the " doctor " come lazily to the train to get the mail and 
the newspaper. In most of the towns the train-conductor is looked upon with 
awe, and is invariably addressed as "captain." The railroads are well managed 
in everything save speed, and the natives traveling are always civil and commu- 
nicative. Macon is picturesquely perched on a hill, around which a densely 
wooded country stretches away in all directions. The Ocmulgee river winds 
between broken and romantic banks not far from the town ; and near it are 
many Indian mounds and the site of a venerable fort, used during the wars with 
the Cherokees. The cotton factories, large iron foundries and the railway activity 
of Macon, give it even a more sprightly appearance than Columbus ; but the lat- 
ter has 15,000 population, while Macon has but 10,000. The Wesleyan Female 
College and the Southern Botanic-Medical Institute, as well as the State Academy 
for the Blind, are located at Macon. From the pretty Rose Hill cemetery the 
outlook over the Ocmulgee is very fine. 

Society is good and cultured in Savannah and in most of the large towns 
through the State. There is still bitterness and ostracism for him who votes 
the Republican ticket, whether he comes with the odor of carpet- baggery 
about him or not. Savannah is more courteous and liberal in her sentiments 
than a few years since, but keeps up a latent bitter feeling, ready to be flashed 
out on good occasions. These remarks do not apply with so much force to 
the gentlemen as to the ladies, for the average Southern man is altogether too 
American and too frank to show resentment toward individuals because they 
represent the best element of a party whose worst elements are obnoxious to 
him. There is a tendency among large numbers of the men to sink politics, 
and to attend with all their energies to business. But all seem determined to 
make Georgia's government one "for white men;" and whenever there is any 
need for concerted action, every one is alert. Still it is morally certain that 
before a continued prosperity all political troubles will finally disappear. The 
labor question is the important one for Georgia, and all the other cotton States, 
to settle. The negro, after he discovers what he loses by allowing himself 
to be intimidated or talked out of his vote, will learn to respect it, and use it 
intelligently. The negroes of the State are possessed of no small acuteness 
and power of development, and, wherever there are educational facilities for it, 
they speedily improve them. The especial need of the race is good teachers, 
raised from its own ranks, and the creation of the university at Atlanta for the 
colored population was one of the most beneficent works of the American Mis- 
sionary Society. 



GEORGIAN LOWLAND SCENERY. 



375 



The Georgia University at Athens, frequented, of course, exclusively by 
whites, is an excellent institution. It was endowed by the Legislature in 1788, 
but did not begin its sessions until 1801, since which time it has been noted 
among Southern literary institutions. Milledgeville, the quondam capital of 
Georgia, is a quaint and pretty little town on the Oconee river, not far from 
Macon. The State asylum for the insane is located there, and the legislators 
now and then ominously mutter that they would like to remove all the govern- 
mental machinery from Atlanta back to the old governmental seat ; but the 
Atlanta influence is powerful against such a movement. 

The deft and graceful pen of that sprightly and distinguished Georgian 
poet, Mr. Paul H. Hayne, is fitter than mine to paint aright the charms of the 
Georgia lowland scenery. To a poet's verse belong the inexpressible charms of 
the dark green and sombre foliage, the hurry of waters on the white, low beaches, 
the sighing of the wind through the long and dainty moss-beards, and the 
magical effects of sunrise and moonrise on the broad and placid current of the 
Savannah. To verse belong the many stories and legends of the chain of fertile 
islands strung along the Georgian coast, 
from Tybee to Cumberland. These 
island plantations have been fast falling 
into decay since the close of the war, 
and the culture of sea- island cotton on 
them has experienced many sad re- 
verses. The war left its scars on these 
islands. The Union troops seized Ty- 
bee, near the mouth of the Savannah, 
as early as 1862, and from it bombarded 
that superb fortification, Fort Pulaski, 
on Cockspur Island. The massive walls 
of Pulaski, on which the United States 

had lavished money and Skill, Only tO The old Fort on Tybee Island, Georgia. 

find it turned against them, yielded to the terrible summons hurled at them 
from the mouths of rifled cannon and mortars ; and the battered stones loom 
up to-day, a sad memorial to the passer-by on the river of the havoc wrought 
by civil war. 

Journeying along the coast, one passes Warsaw Sound, where the plucky 
little monitors captured the iron-clad "Atlanta" in 1863; and a sail up the 
Ogeechee river will bring one to the scene of the brave defense of Fort McAl- 
lister, whose little garrison, stirred by a sense of duty, held grimly on, long after 
Sherman was at the gates of Savannah with a victorious army, and the Union 
fleet kept the coast blockaded — long after they had been cut off from all hope 
of relief; held on until captured and literally crushed down by overwhelm- 
ing numbers. The many lagoons which penetrate the low and fertile lands 
are easily accessible, and on the islands there will in future be delightful homes, 
when a fresh and numerous population shall have come to a State whose 
only need is more people. The Atlantic coast of Georgia, seen from the deck 




376 



CUMBERLAND ISLAND FERNANDINA. 



of an ocean steamer, seems low and uninteresting, — only a few sand-hillocks 
now and then looming above the level of the waves, — but a nearer approach 
shows luxuriant vegetation and enviable richness of soil. From Fernandina, in 
North-western Florida, one can easily reach Cumberland Island, the old home 
of General Henry Lee of revolutionary fame, and the scene of sharp fighting 
between British and Americans in 1 8 1 5. On this, as on the neighboring islands, 
the orange grows luxuriantly, and, with a return to careful and thorough culture, 
the cotton crop there could be made of immense value. 

Fernandina is a fine old seaport, with a land-locked harbor in which more 
than 300 square-rigged vessels were anchored at one time during the war of 
18 12. The largest ships can unload without difficulty at its excellent wharves, 
and vessels from all climes come there to load with the lumber which is the main 
article of export. The sugar and cotton plantations, and the orange groves in 
the vicinity were highly prosperous before the war. The beach, eighteen miles 
long, affords delightful drives, and many Northern visitors remain in the ven- 
erable town throughout the winter months. Fernandina is the seat of the Epis- 
copal bishopric of Florida, and the bishop there has charge of a flourishing 
academy for young ladies. 




Happiness. 



XL. 



THE JOURNEY TO FLORIDA — THE PENINSULA'S HISTORY. 

JACKSONVILLE. 

I ENTERED Florida on a frosty morning. Thin flakes of ice had formed in 
the little pools along the railway's sides, and the Northern visitors in the 
Pullman car shrouded themselves in their traveling-blankets and grumbled 
bitterly. Here and there, in the forests' gaps, the negroes had kindled huge 




Moonlight over Jacksonville, Florida. 



fires, and were grouped about them, toasting their heads and freezing their 
backs. Now and then we caught glimpses of beautiful thickets ; we passed long 
stretches of field carpeted with thick growths of palmetto ; with intervening pine- 
barrens, and freight platforms of logs. 

It is 263 miles by the present rail route from Savannah to Jacksonville, the 
chief city of Florida, and the rendezvous for all travelers who intend to penetrate 
to the interior of the beautiful peninsula. The train traverses the distance at the 
comfortable speed of twelve miles an hour ; from time to time, half an hour is 
consumed in wooding up, — an operation performed in the most leisurely manner 



378 THE RAIL ROUTE TO FLORIDA. 

by the negroes, — and one arrives in Jacksonville after a night's travel. The cur- 
rents of Northern comers pour in by three great streams — the Atlantic and 
Gulf rail route from Savannah, the outside steamers from Charleston, which 
ascend the St. John's river as far as Palatka, and the inland route from Savannah, 
which conducts the traveler along a series of estuaries and lagoons between the 
fertile sea islands and the main-land. 

By the first of these routes, one passes but few towns of importance. 
Neither at Live Oak, the junction where one reaches the Jacksonville, Pensacola 
and Mobile railroad, nor at Wellborn, nor at Lake City, is there anything to 
answer to one's ideas of the typical Florida town. The rail route passes Olustee, 
the site of a fierce engagement in February, 1864, between Federals and Con- 
federates, in which the former were defeated. At Baldwin one comes to the 
Florida railroad, grappled to Fernandina, northward, on the Atlantic, and 
stretching away through Duval, Bradford, Alachua, and Leroy counties to Cedar 
Keys, on the Gulf coast. 

When we reached Jacksonville the frost had vanished, and two days there- 
after the genial December sun bade the thermometer testify to 80 degrees in the 
shade. Here and there we saw a tall banana, whose leaves had been yellowed 
by the frost's breath ; but the oranges were unscathed, and the Floridians 
content. 

Pause with me at the gateway of the great peninsula, and reflect for a moment 
upon its history. Fact and fancy wander here hand in hand ; the airy chronicles 
of the ancient fathers hover upon the confines of the impossible. The austere 
Northerner and the cynical European have been heard to murmur incredulously 
at the tales of the modern writers who grow enthusiastic upon the charms of our 
new winter paradise. Yet, what of fiction could exceed in romantic interest the 
history of this venerable State ? What poet's imagination, seven times heated, 
could paint foliage whose splendors should surpass that of the virgin forests of 
the Oclawaha and Indian rivers? What "fountain of youth" could be imagined 
more redolent of enchantment than the " Silver Spring," now annually visited by 
50,000 tourists ? The subtle moonlight, the perfect glory of the dying sun as he 
sinks below a horizon fringed with fantastic trees, the perfume faintly borne from 
the orange grove, the murmurous music of the waves along the inlets, and the 
mangrove-covered banks, are beyond words. 

" Canst thou copy in verse one chime 
Of the woodbell's peal and cry ? 
Write* in a book the morning's prime, 
Or match with words that tender sky?" 

Our American Italy has not a mountain within its boundaries. Extending 
from 25 degrees to 31 degrees north latitude, it has an area of 60,000 square 
miles. Nearly 400 miles in length, it has the latitude of Northern Mexico, the 
desert of Sahara, Central Arabia, Southern China, and Northern Hindostan ; but 
its heats are tempered by the Gulf of Mexico on the one hand, and the Gulf 
Stream, which flows along the eastern coast for 300 miles, on the other. Over 



THE FLOWERY PENINSULA — ITS HISTORY. 379 

the level breadth of ninety miles between these two waters constantly blow odor- 
ous and health-giving ocean winds, and under their influence and that of the 
genial sun springs up an almost miraculous sub-tropical vegetation. It is the 
home of the palmetto and the cabbage palm, the live oak and the cypress, the 
mistletoe with its bright green leaves and red berries, the Spanish moss, the 
ambitious mangrove, the stately magnolia, the smilax china, the orange, the 
myrtle, the water-lily, the jessamine, the cork-tree, the sisal-hemp, the grape, and 
the cocoanut. There the Northerner, wont to boast of the brilliant sunsets of his 
own clime, finds all his past experiences outdone. In the winter months, soft 
breezes come caressingly ; the whole peninsula is carpeted with blossoms, and the 
birds sing sweetly in the untrodden thickets. It has the charm of wildness, of 
mystery ; it is untamed ; civilization has not stained it. No wonder the Indian 
fought ferociously ere he suffered himself to be banished from this charming land. 

The beautiful peninsula has been the ambition of many nationalities. First 
came the hardy Venetian, Cabot, to whose father Henry the Seventh accorded the 
right to navigate all seas under the English flag. In 1497, groping blindly, 
doubtless, like his father before him, for the passage to Cathay, Cabot touched at 
Florida. Early in the sixteenth century came Ponce de Leon, the chimerical old 
Governor of Porto Rico, who vainly sought in the recesses of the peninsula for 
the fabled " Fountain of Youth," and perished in a broil with the savages. To 
him our gratitude is due for the name which the fair land has kept through all 
the changes of domination which have fallen to its lot. During his second search 
after the treasure, landing on Palm Sunday,* amid groves of towering palm-trees, 
and noting the profusion of flowers everywhere, the pious knight christened the 
country "Florida." After him came other Spaniards, bent on proselyting 
Indians by kidnapping and enslaving them ; but speedy vengeance fell on these 
ignoble fellows ; the Indians massacred them by scores. Then Narvaez, and the 
Spaniards in his train, waded through the dangerous lagoons and dreary swamps, 
fought the Indians from behind breastworks made of rotten trees, and finally 
perished in storms along the treacherous coast. Nothing daunted, and fresh 
from triumphs in other lands, De Soto followed, overrunning with his army the 
vast extent of territory which the Spaniards claimed under the name of Florida, 
and which extended from the Chesapeake to the Tortugas. 

The definite settlement of Florida by Europeans was consecrated by a 
massacre, by which the fanatical Spaniard added fresh infamy to his already 
tarnished name. When Coligny had received from Charles the Ninth of France 
permission to found a colony upon the peninsula, and Ribault's expedition had 
erected a monument near the mouth of the St. John's river, ere sailing to found 
the settlement at Port Royal, the Spaniards were enraged ; and as soon as, in 
1564, Laudonniere's expedition had founded Fort Caroline on a little eminence 
a few miles from the mouth of the St. John's (then called the river May), active 
hostilities were begun by Spain. The counter expedition of Menendez de Avila 
resulted in the massacre of all the Huguenots at Fort Caroline ; and the grim 
Spaniards placed an inscription on the spot stating that " the murdered ones had 

* In Spanish, Pascua Florida. 



38O PERTURBED COLONIAL EXISTENCE OF FLORIDA. 

been slain, not as Frenchmen, but as heretics." Two years later came Nemesis, 
in the person of the brave Protestant Chevalier, Dominique de Gourgues of 
France, who relentlessly slew the Spaniards settled on the site of the old Fort 
Caroline, and hanged many of them, averring by an inscription above them 
that it was not done "as to Spaniards, but to traitors, robbers, and murderers." 

The town which Menendez established on the site of the Indian village of 
Seloo, and which he named St. Augustine, was the first permanent European 
settlement in North America. In the eighteenth century the British gained 
possession of Florida. The American colonists had already unsuccessfully tried 
to gain St. Augustine ; but were destined to wait a century longer. In 1 78 1 
the English lost their hold, and the territory reverted to Spain, only to be pur- 
chased by the United States in 18 19, after Fernandina and Pensacola had been 
taken by American arms. Ceded and re-ceded, sacked and pillaged, languishing 
undeveloped through a colonial existence of 200 years, shocked to its centre by 
terrible Indian wars, and plunged into a war of secession at the moment when it 
was hoping for rest and stability, the lovely land seems indeed to have been the 
prey of a stern yet capricious fate. 

It is not wonderful, in view of the perturbed condition of the peninsula, since 
its discovery, that to-day it has hardly more than a quarter of a million of inhab- 
itants, and that its rich lands remain untilled. The weight of the slave system 
kept it down, after the Government of the United States had guaranteed it 
against the wonted invasions and internal wars ; the remoteness from social 
centres enforced by the plantation life made its populations careless of the enter- 
prise and thrift which characterize a country filled with rich and thriving towns ; 
and the few acres which were tilled were forced to exhaustion by the yearly 
production of the same staple. Now, with more than 33,000,000 of acres 
within its limits, it has barely 3,000,000 partially improved, and on its 10,000 
farms much is still woodland. Large farms and plantations have, through- 
out the State, decreased, and small ones have multiplied, but the total yearly 
value of farm products now rises hardly above $11,000,000 or $12,000,000, 
while the value of its home manufactures is but a couple of hundred thousand 
dollars. With 1,100 miles of practicable coast line, studded with excellent bays, 
and with such noble navigable rivers as the St. John's, the St. Mary's, the 
Appalachicola, and the Suwanee, it is strange that a larger commerce has not 
sprung up within the State limits. 

We will not be too statistical. Imagine yourself transferred from the trying- 
climate of the North or North-west into the gentle atmosphere of the Floridian 
peninsula, seated just at sunset in an arm-chair, on some of the verandas which 
overlook the pretty square in Jacksonville. Your face is fanned by the warm 
December breeze, and the chippering of the birds mingles with the music which 
the negro band is playing in yonder portico. The lazy, ne'er-do-well negro 
boys playing in the sand so abundant in all the roads, have the unconscious pose 
and careless grace of Neapolitan beggars. Here and there among the dusky 
race is a face beautiful as was ever that of olive-brown maid in Messina. This 
is the South, slumbrous, voluptuous, round and graceful. Here beauty peeps 



JACKSONVILLE AND THE ST. JOHNS RIVER. 



381 




from every door-yard. Mere exist- 
ence is pleasure ; exertion is a bore. 
Through orange -trees and grand 
oaks thickly bordering the broad 
avenues gleams the wide current of 
the St. John's river. Parallel with 
it runs Bay street, Northern in ap- 
pearance, with brick blocks on 
either side, with crowds of smartly 
dressed tourists hurrying through 
it, with a huge "National Hotel," 
with banks, with elegant shops. 
Fine shell roads run out beyond 
the town limits, in either direction. 
Riding toward the river's mouth, 
which is twenty -five miles below 
the town, one comes to marshes 
and broad expanses of luscious 
green thicket. Passing the long 
rows of steam saw- mills, — Jackson- 
ville is a flourishing lumber port, — 
one comes to the point of debarca- 
tion for millions of feet of pine 
lumber, shingles and staves, and 
great quantities of naval stores. 
The fleet of sailing vessels used in 
this trade find at the new city as 
fine a port as the country can 
boast. 

The St. John's, at Jacksonville, 
makes a crescent bend, not unlike 
that of the Mississippi at New 
Orleans. Nearly two miles broad 
directly in front of the wharves, it 
widens to an expanse of six miles a 
little way above, offering superb 
opportunities for commerce. The 
bar at its mouth is nearly always 
practicable for large ocean steam- 
ers, and they run with ease to 
Palatka, sixty miles above Jackson- 
ville. The journey is charming 
from the river's mouth, past Baton 
island, the residence of the hardy 
river pilots, and the site of two 



382 JACKSONVILLE AS A WINTER RESORT. 

excellent light -houses; past the mounds of oyster -shells, through which 
tangled shrubbery has pierced a difficult way ; past the intensely white dunes, 
glistening under the sun, and ghastly and weird under the moonlight; past 
the little eminence known as St. John's Bluff, the location of old Fort Caroline, 
where Menendez massacred the unfortunate Huguenots; and past Yellow Bluff, 
with its ancient Spanish ramparts. Along the river-side, on elevated ground 
beyond the , commercial part of the town, many New York and Boston gentle- 
men have erected elegant residences, and the climate has already seduced them 
from even a summer allegiance to their Northern birthplaces. The view from 
" Riverside " is charming. 

It is not a score of years since there was a corn-field on the site of Bay street,, 
now the chief avenue of a city of twelve thousand inhabitants. Jacksonville was 
once known as "Cow Ford." There the "King's Road," in the old days, crossed 
the river, and connected the northern settlements with St. Augustine. During 
the war it ran to decay; it was strongly fortified, and was clung to desperately 
by the Confederates. The Union troops occupied it then several times, and on 
the third assault a fire sprang out, which did much damage. At the close of the 
great struggle, the grass stood waist- high in the streets, and the cattle had taken 
refuge from the sun in the deserted houses. But the North has swept on in such 
a resistless current that, so far as its artificial features are concerned, the city has 
grown up according to the New England pattern, though foliage, climate, sun — 
all these are the antipodes of those of the North ! 

A good many people fancy that, in going to Florida, they are about to absent 
themselves from all the accessories of civilization, — that they must undergo con- 
siderable privation. Nothing could better correct this impression than a stay of 
a few days in Jacksonville. Such good hotels as the St. James and the National, 
such well-ordered streets, such charming suburbs as " Brooklyn " and " River- 
side " and " La Villa " and " Wyoming," where the invalid can find the coveted 
repose and enjoy the delicious climate ; such an abundance of newspapers and 
books, of carriages and saddle-horses, and such convenient access to all other 
desirable points along the great river, are sufficient to satisfy even the most 
querulous. Jacksonville is filled with pleasant houses where lodgings are let; and 
from December until April its population is doubled ; society is active ; excur- 
sions, parties, and receptions occur almost daily ; gayety rules the hour. For it 
is not invalids alone who crowd Florida now-a-days, but the wealthy and the well. 
One-fourth of the annual visitors are in pursuit of health ; the others are crusad- 
ing to find the phantom Pleasure. Fully one-half of the resident population of 
Jacksonville is Northern, and has settled there since the war. The town boasts 
excellent public schools for white and black children ; the Catholics have estab- 
lished educational institutions there, and there are several fine churches. The 
winter evenings are delightful. In the early days of December, on my first visit, 
the mercury during the day ranged from 79 to 80 degrees, but at nightfall sank 
to 70 degrees, and the cool breeze from the river produced a most delicious 
temperature. 



XLI. 



UP THE ST. JOHN'S RIVER — TOCOI — ST. AUGUSTINE. 



THE St. John's river is a capricious stream, and the Indians characterized it 
for its waywardness as "Il-la-ka," — meaning that "it had its own way, 
which was contrary to every other." Its actual source no man knows, though it 
seems to be formed by a myriad of small streams pouring out of the unexplored 
region along the Indian river. It is four hundred miles in length, and here and 
there broadens into lakes from six to twelve miles wide. The banks are low and 
flat, but bordered with a wealth of exquisite foliage to be seen -nowhere else upon 
this continent. One passes for hundreds of miles through a grand forest of 
cypresses robed in moss and mistletoe; of palms towering gracefully far above the 
surrounding trees, of palmettoes whose rich trunks gleam in the sun ; of swamp, 
white and black ash, of magnolia, of 
water oak, of poplar, and of plane- 
tree ; and, where hummocks rise a few 
feet above the water-level, the sweet 
bay, the olive, the cotton-tree, the 
juniper, the red cedar, the sweet gum, 
the live oak, shoot up their splendid 
stems ; while among the shrubbery 
and inferior growths one may note 
the azalea, the sumach, the sensitive- 
plant, the agave, the poppy, the mal- 
low and the nettle. The vines run 
not in these thickets, but over them. 
The fox grape clambers along the 
branches, and the woodbine and bign- 
onia escalade the haughtiest forest 
monarchs. When the steamer nears 
the shore, one can see far through the 
tangled thickets the gleaming water 
out of which rise thousands of " cy- 
press-knees," looking exactly like so 
many champagne bottles set into the 
current to cool. The heron and the crane saucily watch the shadow which 
the approaching boat throws near their retreat. The wary monster-turtle gazes 
for an instant, with his black head cocked knowingly on one side, then disap- 
pears with a gentle slide and a splash. An alligator grins familiarly as a dozen 




Residence of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, at Mandarin, 
Florida. [Page 386.] 



384 



UP THE ST. JOHNS RIVER. 



revolvers are pointed at him over the boat's side, suddenly "winks with his tail," 
and vanishes ! as the bullet meant for his tough hide skims harmlessly over the 
ripples left above him. 

The noble stream appears of a dark blue, as one sails along it, but, taken up 
in a glass, the water is of a light coffee color, a thin scum sometimes rising to its 
surface. Its slightly brackish taste is accounted for by the fact that the ocean 
tides are often perceptible as far up as Lake George. Many insist that there must 
be springs along the channel of the river, as they cannot otherwise account for 
its great volume. For its whole length of four hundred miles, it affords glimpses 
of perfect beauty. One ceases to regret hills and mountains, and can hardly 




Green Cove Springs, on the St. John's River, Florida. [Page 386.] 

imagine ever having thought them necessary, so much do these visions surpass 
them. It is not grandeur which one finds on the banks of the great stream, 
it is nature run riot. The very irregularity is delightful, the decay is charming, 
the solitude is picturesque. The bitter-sweet orange grows in wild profusion 
along the St. John's and its tributary streams; thousands of orange-trees demand 
but transplanting and careful culture to become prolific fruit-bearers. 

The local steamers which ascend the river from Jacksonville regularly leave 
the wharves at eleven in the morning, though advertised for nine, as it has been 
a tradition, time out of mind, that they shall be two hours late. This brace of 
hours will be well spent by the traveler, however, if he seats himself on the deck 
and watches the proceedings on the wharf. A multitude of drays, driven by 



FROM JACKSONVILLE TO TOCOI. 385 

ragged negroes, come and go incessantly, bringing every conceivable kind of mer- 
chandise and household goods ; the deck hands carry piles of lumber, baskets of 
eggs, crates of crockery, hoist in kicking and biting mules, toss aboard half-a- 
hundred chickens tied by the legs ; stow away two or three portable houses des- 
tined for the far interior, where some lone lumbermen are felling the massive 
cypresses ; and finally fill in the interstices with coal, chains, fertilizers, salt pork, 
garden seeds, mail-bags, and an unimaginable hodge-podge. Meantime, if the 
boat you have taken be her favorite, "Aunt Rose," the venerable river steward- 
ess, — one of the characters along the Jacksonville wharves, — has danced up and 
down the gang-planks a hundred times with various letters and packages. Even 
though the day be hot, you find that a cool breeze comes from the dense thickets 
and forests bordering the current, for you go up the stream at a rapid pace when 
at last the little craft moves off. 

It used to be said, a few years since, that the St. John's banks, from its 
mouth to its source, were strewn with the wrecks of orange groves. After the 
war, hundreds of Northerners who knew little of Florida rushed in, dug up the 
wild orange-trees from the swamps, and transplanted them along the river banks; 
leaving them with the firm belief that they would care for themselves, and that, 
in a few years, golden fortunes would hang on every tree. But these careless 
cultivators were doomed to bitter disappointment; hardly any of them succeeded. 
In their train, however, came Northerners who made a study of the culture, and 
now there are dozens of noble groves scattered up and down the river, and a 
score of years hence the perfume of the orange leaf will be encountered at every 
point along the stream. 

When the war closed there was not a wharf left on the river. Federal and 
Confederate had warred and wasted, and to-day for memento there lies in the 
stream, some distance above Jacksonville, a sunken gun-boat, its engine gear just 
showing above the waves. Inquiring of a venerable Floridian how it happened 
to be there, I was informed that " the durned Yankees' shot was too hot for 
her." 

The journey from Jacksonville to Tocoi is delightful, though one's first experi- 
ence of the great river has a zest which no subsequent one can rival. Stemming 
the current, which, under the brilliant noonday sunshine,, seems a sheet of 
molten silver, the steamer passes little tugs, drawing in their train immense rafts 
of cypress and pine logs; or salutes, with three loud shrieks, the ponderous "City 
Point" or "Dictator," from Charleston. The cattle, knee-deep in water, are feed- 
ing on the fresh herbage springing from the sand-bars; hundreds of little fish are 
leaping out of the current and falling back again, their shining bodies coquettishly 
bent as if they were making mock of the sun. Sometimes the boat enters a 
pleasant inlet, where the pines on the shores have cut across the " hummock " 
and stand quaintly draped in Spanish moss, as if they had come to be baptized. 
Fifteen miles from Jacksonville, on the eastern shore, is the pretty town of Man- 
darin, so called from the culture there of that variety of the orange. Through 
the trees gleam white cottages. Orange groves, with the golden fruit glistening 
among the dark leaves, come to the very water's edge. There, in winter, lives 



386 MANDARIN MAGNOLIA GREEN COVE SPRINGS. 

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, besieged by hundreds of visitors, who do not seem 
to understand that she is not on exhibition. Mandarin was once the scene of a 
dreadful Indian massacre ; a generation ago, the Seminoles fell upon it and mas- 
sacred all within its limits. 

"Hibernia," on its island, with a lovely promenade under the sheltering 
branches of live oaks, and " Magnolia," where a large establishment was erected 




On the Road to St. Augustine, Florida. 

especially for invalids many years ago, and is now very successfully conducted, 
are on the right, as you ascend, and are much frequented by Northerners. Oak 
forests border the water, and pines and palmettoes form a striking background. 
Throughout the winter months these health-resorts have the climate of Indian 
summer, and at Green Cove Spring, just above Magnolia, where there are 
sulphur waters of peculiar healing virtues in rheumatism and dyspepsia, a goodly 
company usually assembles with the first advent of "the season." Crossing the 
river to Picolata, a wharf with a prospective town, the steamer follows the eastern 
bank until it arrives at Tocoi, whence an extempore horse-railway conducts the 
traveler to St. Augustine. The traveler was formerly condemned to journey 
from Picolata to St. Augustine, over a terrible road, through cypress clumps and 
masses of briars, and palmettoes, in a species of volante, in which his bones 
were so racked that he rarely recovered before it was time to make the journey 
again. 

It is expected that a railroad will one day penetrate the country between 
Jacksonville and St. Augustine, and following the coast as far as Cape Sable, be 



THE ROUTE TO ST. AUGUSTINE. 



387 



conducted over trestles to Key West, thus placing Cuba within three or four 
hours' sail. The road could be built for a comparatively small sum, as it would 
run through an absolutely level country. 

But that road would rob good old St. Augustine of its romance. I object to 
it on that account ; and so, I am sure, will many hundred others. What ! must 
we lose the pleasure of arriving at nightfall at the Sebastian river, and hearing 
the cheery horn sounded as we dash through the quaint streets, and alight at the 
hostelry ? A bas the railroad ! rather let us have the diligence, the mules with 
tinkling silver bells, the broad - hatted, velvet -jacketed drivers of primitive 
Spain. 

Useless — vain — these protestations; as I stand on the wharf, at Tocoi, I 
can see that modernism is already here. A horse-car ! Ye guardians of the 
venerable ! 

Out through a seemingly interminable forest leads a straight road, bordered 
here by pines, and there by the palmettoes which spring in dense beds from the 
rolling ground. There is a little group of houses at Tocoi, and along the river 
bank, under the shade of the beautiful moss-hung oaks, several Northerners have 
•established charming homes. A few miles back from the river, on either side, are 
good sugar-lands, and the negroes about the station are munching stalks of cane. 
An old mill near by is half- buried under a wilderness of tropical vegetation. At 
intervals in the forest, palm-trees shoot up their slender, graceful trunks. 




A Street in St. Augustine, Florida. [ Page 388. ] 



It is eighteen miles from Tocoi to St. Augustine. The journey is made 
partly on iron, partly on wooden rails ; but is comfortable, and affords one an 
.excellent chance to see a veritable Florida back-country. There is not a house 



388 ST. AUGUSTINE EY NIGHT. 

along the route ; hardly a sign of life. Sometimes the roll of the wheels startles 
an alligator who has been napping on the track ; and once, the conductor says, 
they found two little brown bears asleep in the run directly in their path. It is 
night ere you approach the suburbs of the old city. The vegetation takes on a 
ghostly aspect ; the black swamp canal over which the vehicle passes sends up a 
fetid odor of decay ; the palm thickets under the moonlight in the distance set 
one to tropical imaginings. Arrived at the Sebastian river, an arm of the sea 
flowing in among long stretches of salt-marsh clad in a kind of yellowish grass, 
and inhabited by innumerable wild fowl that make the air ring with their cries, 
the horse-car stops, you are transferred to an omnibus, brown- skinned Minor- 
cans and French touters for hotels surround you ; the horn sounds ta-ra ! ta-ra- 
ta-ra ! and you rattle through the streets to the hotel. 




St. Augustine, Honda — "An ancient gateway 



There is no noise in the town ; evening has brought with it profound quiet- 
As for me, alighting at the " Magnolia," in a street as narrow as any in Valencia 
or Genoa, I stroll, after supper, into the dark and mysterious lanes. This moon- 
less night is kindly ; it lends the proper weirdness — the charm which should be 
thrown about St. Augustine. Walking in the middle of the street, which is over- 
hung by wide projecting balconies, I detect a murmur, as of far-off music — a soft 
and gentle monotone. Now that I hear it clearly, surely it is the rhythm of the 
sea, and the warm breeze which blew across my face had a smell of the ocean. 
There is plainly the sound of water lapping on the shore. Ah! here is a half- 
ruined cottage built of coquina, with a splendid palmetto overshadowing its 
remains, and some strange vines which I cannot identify in the darkness, 
creeping about the decaying windows ! A little farther on, an open plain — and 
here an ancient gateway, with a fragment of a high wall adjoining it; to the 



THE SEA-WALL — THE PLAZA. 3^9 

right — looming up through the shadows at a little distance — the massive walls 
and mauresque towers of an antique fortress. Yonder is the beach, and, as I 
draw near to it, I see two or three stalwart figures pulling in a boat. 

I turn again, and wander through other streets, Hypolita, Bay, Treasury 
Lane. Some of the little alleys are barely eight feet wide. Where is the bravo 
with his dagger ? Not here. St. Augustine is most peaceable of towns. No 
moss-grown corner of Europe, asleep these two hundred years, shall boast a 
steadier population than this — our oldest town in the United States. 

Here is a sea-wall wide enough to walk upon. Against it the waves are 
gently beating. The fort yonder seems now but a great blot on the sky. I come 
to the Plaza, a little park in the city's midst. A few fishermen, a soldier or two, 
and some visitors are lazily reclining on the benches opposite the venerable 
Cathedral. A tall white monument stands in the park's centre. I light a match, 
and climb the pedestal. 

Plaza de la Constitucion. 

Monument to one of the short-lived forms of government in Spain. Nothing 
but a plain shaft. 

Now every one has left the square. There are no lights, no voices. So I go 
home to bed. 

Morning, in mid-December, brings warmth and sunlight; noon, slumbrous 
heat. Still roaming in the quiet streets, I see few signs of activity. Hammers 
are ringing on the walls of the new wooden hotel in which Northern tourists are 
to be lodged, a splendid coquina wall, which might have stood for another 
century, having been torn down to make room for this ephemeral box. The old 
arch, which marked the site of the Treasury, is crumbling, and will soon vanish. 
The quondam residence of the Spanish Governors, on the west side of the Plaza, 
has been rebuilt and altered until there is nothing antique in its appearance. It 
is now a prosaic court-house and post-office, and around its doors daily gather 
swarms of Northern tourists awaiting their mail. The balconies of the huge St 
Augustine Hotel are crowded at evening when the band of the crack artillery 
regiment plays. 



XLII. 

ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA FORT MARION. 

ST. Augustine, which a proud Spanish monarch once called the " Siem- 
pre fiel Ciudad," is situated on the eastern coast of Florida. The town is 
built on a small peninsula between the St. Sebastian river and the harbor. 
Menendez drew the attention of the Spanish nation to the spot by landing there 
in 1565 ; by his joyous return to the little garrison there, and his reception by 
the priesthood, who glorified him for the zeal he had displayed, after the massacre 
of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline ; and by the subsequent bloody deeds among 
the dunes of Anastasia Island, at Matanzas Inlet. Menendez, finding that 
Ribault's Huguenots had been wrecked near this inlet, went to them with seem- 
ing protestations of friendship. He heard their pitiable story ; how they had lost 
four galleons in the mighty storm, and that other vessels were missing; how they 
desired boats with which to traverse the inlet, and to pass through St. Augustine 
on their way to a fort "which they had twenty leagues from there." Menendez 
was too thorough a scoundrel and too little of a gentleman to declare open war 
against them, but he announced boldly that he had massacred the garrison and 
destroyed the fort. Then they desired that he should enable them to return to 
France, since "the kings of Spain and of France were brothers and friends." 
But Menendez told them that, as they were of the new sect, he held them for 
enemies, and if they would throw themselves upon his mercy he would do with 
them what God should of His mercy direct. Thus, having shifted the responsi- 
bility of his crime from himself to his Maker, he enticed the unfortunate French- 
men into his clutches, and, after tying their hands, his soldiers massacred every 
one of them. As the two hundred and eight prisoners came, one by one, into a 
lonely place among the sand-hills, they were poignarded and stricken down by 
the swords of their treacherous and murderous assailants. It is not strange that 
the Floridian should to this day speak of the "bloody Matanzas river." 

But this was not all. On the very next day after the massacre, the Spaniards, 
who had returned to St. Augustine, learned that large numbers of Frenchmen 
had been seen " at the same part of the river as the others had been." This was 
Ribault himself, with the remains of his shipwrecked company. The Adelantado, 
Menendez the infamous, at once pushed forward to meet them. A conference 
was had ; the Frenchmen were shown the dead bodies of their comrades, and 
grimly directed to surrender to the clemency of the noble hidalgos. Terrified 
and shocked, starving and without any means of escape, Ribault surrendered 
himself and 150 of the men-at-arms with him, as well as the royal standards, 



MENENDEZ MATANZAS THE SEA-WALL. 



391 




The Remains of a Citadel at Matanzas Inlet. 



into the hands of Menendez. Two hundred of Ribault's men, well knowing the 
fate in store for them, had braved the horrors of the wilderness during the night, 
preferring them to Spanish "clemency." Ribault and the others who surren- 
dered, save sixteen persons, were ruthlessly slaughtered. 

In the world's historj^ there is recorded no more infamous massacre than this. 
The two hundred who fled the night before the final massacre built a fort at some 
distance from St. Augustine, but were 
finally attacked by the Spaniards, and 
great numbers were made prisoners. 
Menendez did not kill them, perhaps 
fearing that a fourth slaughter would 
arouse even the tardy fury of the 
King of France, but pressed them 
into his service. 

That was three hundred years ago. 
The remains of a citadel are still visible 
at Matanzas Inlet, and a Government 
revenue officer keeps as regular watch 
there as ever did Menendez, but not 
exactly with the same intent. The 
first fort built at St. Augustine is de- 
scribed by the ancient chroniclers as built of logs, and it is said to have 
been the council - house of the Indian village, on which site the town is 
founded. The ruins at Matanzas are undoubtedly more ancient than any 
building in St. Augustine. 

Menendez went to his reward in 1574, and for two centuries thereafter the 
records of the settlement were eventful. Sir Francis Drake attacked and burned 
it in 1586; the buccaneers now and then landed and plundered the helpless 
inhabitants, and Indians massacred the missionaries. At the end of the seven- 
teenth century the Spanish Government saw that the sea threatened to wash away 
the town, and for half a century thereafter the inhabitants toiled at the erection 
of a massive sea-wall, the remains of which may now be seen in the middle of 
Bay street, and which has been superseded by the fine breakwater built by the 
United States Government between 1837 and 1843. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the South Carolinians came in 
hostile array against St. Augustine by land and sea. The siege by land was suc- 
cessful, the attack by sea was a fiasco, and the invasion failed after having cost 
South Carolina ,£6,000, for which she issued promises to pay. A quarter of a 
century later the Carolinians raided again upon the old town, but went no farther 
than the gates. In 1740 Governor Oglethorpe, of Georgia, led a movement of 
Georgians, Carolinians and English against it ; but retired, after an unsuccessful 
siege and bombardment. Shortly thereafter, the garrison of St. Augustine 
retaliated, and attacked the English settlements in Georgia with a formidable 
force; it was profitless. Back came Oglethorpe in 1743, carrying fire and death 
to the very walls of the old fort. 



392 



OLD ST. AUGUSTINE. 



At the time of Oglethorpe's siege, St. Augustine was stoutly walled about 
and intrenched, with salient angles and redoubts. On the principal fort, fifty 
pieces of brass cannon were mounted, and growled defiance across a moat two 
score feet wide to any enemy prowling beneath the walls. There were twenty- 




view of Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida. [Page 394.] 

five hundred inhabitants — of which nearly one-half were Spanish soldiers. Out- 
posts were maintained on the St. John's river, and scouts quickly brought 
intelligence of any hostile movement. 

England obtained the province of Florida by treaty in 1763, and when the 
red-coats came to St. Augustine, the Spanish inhabitants nearly all left. Many 
of them or their descendants, however, returned when the English had decided to 
get rid of the troublesome colony, and recession to Spain occurred in 1783, in 
exchange for the Bahama islands. In 1821, the standard of Spain, which had 
been raised by Menendez and his men, 256 years before, over St. Augustine, 
was hauled down, and the stars and stripes were raised in its place. 

Since then, the old town has had its share of vicissitudes. It changed hands 
three times during our civil war. 

A century ago, St. Augustine was, in general plan, very much as it is now. 
The "Governor's official residence," the present court-house, has lost the beau- 
tiful garden which surrounded it ; a Franciscan convent stood on the site of 
the artillery barracks of to-day. An Indian village was still standing upon the 
little peninsula in those days, and to the town's fortifications had been added 
a ditch, along whose sides were planted thick rows of the Spanish bayonet, 
forming an almost impenetrable chevaux de /rise." The outer lines of defense 
can still be traced. The gardens surrounding the solidly built two-story flat- 
roofed houses were still filled with fruit-trees, as the Spaniards had left them; 
the fig, pomegranate, lemon, lime, orange, guava and the bergamot, flourished 
then as now ; and over the lattices great vines trailed, bending under loads of 
luscious grapes. 



THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE HISTORIC CITY. 



393 



The romance of the place is now gradually departing. The merry proces- 
sions of the carnival, with mask, violin and guitar, are no longer kept up with 
the old taste ; the rotund figure of the padre, the delicate form of the Spanish 
lady, clad in mantilla and basquina, and the tall, erect, brilliantly uniformed cav- 
aliers, are gone; the "posy dance," with its arbors and garlands, is forgotten; 
and the romantic suburbs are undergoing a complete transformation. 

The wealth of Northern cities is erecting fine pleasure houses, surrounded 
with noble orchards and gardens, and in a few years there will be as many villas 
as at Newport within a half hour's drive from the centre of St. Augustine. A 
brilliant society already gathers there every winter, and departs reluctantly when 
the long summer heats begin. Although the majority of those who visit the 
venerable town are not in search of health so much as of an agreeable climate, 
and an escape from the annoyances of winter, still, the preservation of health 
has been found so certain in the genial air of Florida, that hundreds of families 
have determined to make it henceforth their winter home. 

Those invalids who cannot endure a sea-air would do well to avoid St. 
Augustine, and seek some of the interior towns ; but the overworked and 
careworn, the sufferers from nervous disease, can find speedy relief in the per- 
meating influence of the genial sunshine, which continues almost uninter- 




Light- house on Anastasia Island, near St. Augustine, Florida. 

ruptedly throughout the winter months. In December, the days are ordinarily 
bright and sunny, a salt sea- wind blowing across the peninsula; from ten until 
four o'clock, one can sit out of doors, bathed in floods of delicious light. During 
my stay at St. Augustine, in December, there were two days in which I gave 
myself completely up to the mere pleasure of existence. I seemed incapable 



394 



FORT MARION, 



of any effort ; the strange fascination of the antiquated and remote fortress- 
town was upon me. The sunshine penetrated to every corner of my room. 
There was no broad and unpleasant glare — no impertinent staring on the sun's 
part, but a gladsome light which I have never seen elsewhere. I walked out 
at noonday ; the town seemed transfigured : the shadows thereon from the 
balconies, from the date-trees, from the thickets of roses, were mystical ; I sat 
down on the grass-grown rampart near old Fort Marion, and (forgetting the 
gnats) let the gentle sea-breeze caress my temples, and memories of by-gone 
centuries take complete possession of me. At that moment, the rest of the 
world seemed as remote as Paradise, vague as Ilium, foreign as the Zendavesta. 

Falling, at last, to contemplation of the ancient fort, I could not repress my 
indignation as I remembered that when there was talk of building a railroad to 
St. Augustine, some enterprising company wished to buy and demolish the quaint 




View of the Entrance to Fort Marion, St Augustine, Florida. 

landmark, that they might establish a railway terminus there. Such vandalism 
would be a disgrace to us. The fort should be tenderly clung to. The 
more moss-grown it becomes, the more we should love it. It is a grand monu- 
ment. For more than a century hundreds Cff men toiled in the quarries on 
Anastasia Island and along the bay shore, wresting out the material now in the 
massive walls. 

Coquina, of which the fort is built, is a kind of concretion of shell-fragments, 
often very beautiful. This formation extends along the Floridian coast for more 
than a hundred miles. It crumbles when exposed for a very long time to the 
air, but rarely falls to pieces. Coquina resists a bombardment better than ordi- 
nary stone, as it is elastic and will bend before the fiery messengers; so that it is 
quite possible that Fort Marion, decaying and aged though it seem, would stand 
the broadsides of a foreign man-of-war better than the forts which have been 
built but a few years. 

This fort is built after Vauban's principles, in the form of a trapezium, with 
walls twenty-one feet high and enormously thick, and with bastions at each 



THE INTERIOR OF THE FORT. 



395 



corner, originally named after St. Paul, St. Pierre, etc. The Castle of San Marco 
was its former title. On it the Appalachean Indians labored for sixty years. 
The garrison was also compelled to contribute to the work, and convicts were 
brought from far Mexico to labor in the quarries. Thousands of hands must 
have been employed for half a century in transporting the giant blocks across 
the bay, and raising them to position in the thick walls. As one traverses the 
draw-bridge, coming down the town, he sees over the main entrance the arms 
of Spain, with the globe and cross above them, and an inscription showing that 
in 1756 Field-Marshal Don Alonzo Fernando Herrera, then "Governor and Cap- 
tain of the City of San Augustin de la Florida," finished the castle, " Don Fer- 
nando Sixth being then King of Spain." 

"San Marco," now Fort Marion, has never been taken by a besieging enemy. 
It is a noble fortification, requiring one hundred cannon and a thousand men as 
complement and garrison ; and it has been so strengthened by the water-battery 
added to it since the United States came into possession that it is a very formi- 
dable defense. The old sergeant in charge exhibits the interior to visitors. You 
penetrate the cell which was suddenly discovered some years ago by a break in 
a wall, and which the Spaniards had con- 
cealed before ceding the fort to our Gov- 
ernment. In this cell were found cages in 
which men had been confined. Torch in 
hand, the sergeant leads you through the 
chapel in the casemate, to the cell whence 
a Seminqle chief once made his escape 
during the war with his countrymen, and 
mounts with you to the breezy promenade 
overlooking the water- battery, flanked at 
either end by the little Moorish sentry- 
boxes whence the men-at-arms were wont 
to watch the forest and the sea for the 
approach of the enemies who came so fre- 
quently. The moss-grown and discolored 
walls, the worn coquina slits, £he gloomy 
corridors, the mysterious recesses, the 
grand old moat, with the gigantic walls 
above it, are too perfect reminders of the 
past to be allowed to perish. The vandal 
who shall destroy Fort Marion will deserve 
banishment. 

The cathedral is in real Spanish style, 
and although it is neither large nor im- 
posing, there is a subtle charm about its gray walls, its time-eaten doorway, 
its belfry from which bell-notes are always clanging. On Sunday evenings, 
crowds assemble in the Plaza, and listen to the sweet- voiced choir at vespers, 
while from the Episcopal Church across the way, one can now and then hear 




'The old sergeant in charge. 



396 



THE CATHEDRAL THE MINORCANS. 




The Cathedral — St. Augustine, Florida. 



the murmur of Protestant song. I shall not soon forget the startling contrast 
which I observed one Sabbath evening in the Plaza. The cathedral bells tolled 

solemnly. I could see, in the 
open belfry, three bright-faced 
lads striking the notes on the 
bells ; while out from under 
the gray portal came a funeral 
procession, — the young aco- 
lytes in their long robes of black 
and white, then the priests and 
the mourners, strange, dark- 
bearded men, and dark-skinned 
women, facing in sombre fash- 
ion toward the little cemetery. 
It was like a bit out of the 
seventeenth century. Turning, 
I saw, on the Plaza's other 
side, the congregation leaving 
the Episcopal Church — hosts 
of richly dressed ladies chatting 
gayly together; the row of 
young gentlemen ranged outside to criticise the belles admiringly ; an army 
officer passing, and touching his cap with lofty courtesy ; and half-a-dozen 
Northerners eagerly discussing the latest news from the stock market ; — this was 
the nineteenth century come to St. Augustine. 

The brown maidens, the olive-colored women that you see in the streets, are 
the descendants of that colony from the Minorcan Islands, which one Dr. Turn- 
bull induced to settle on the coast, at a place called New Smyrna, more than 
a hundred years ago. Fourteen hundred persons were brought out, and engaged 
in the culture of indigo, which then commanded an enormous price. Turnbull 
succeeded in obtaining absolute control over the defenseless colonists, cut them 
off from all communication with other settlements, and was rapidly reducing 
them to a condition of actual slavery, when they revolted, but in vain ; and it 
was not until the English attorney-general of the province interfered in their 
behalf, that they were emancipated from Turnbull's tyranny, and allowed to 
remove to St. Augustine, where they and their descendants have now been a 
part of the population for nearly a century. Their old habits and customs, 
brought from the islands, are rapidly dying out ; and the dialect songs which 
Mr. Bryant heard during his visit, in 1843, have almost entirely disappeared. 
Many of the women are extremely beautiful in their youth, but they fade early. 
The men are bold, hardy fishermen, Greek and Italian in type and robustness — 
while the women have much of the delicacy of form and feature of their American 
sisters. 

Much as one may fear that the influx of Northern fashion may rob the old town 
of its chief charm, it is easy to see that a delightful watering-place is to be created. 



WINTER LIFE IN ST. AUGUSTINE. 397 

The people of New England, who seem to have taken Florida under their espe- 
cial tutelage, there meet and mingle freely with those from other sections ; even 
the English and French are beginning to find attractions at St. Augustine, and 
my lord doffs his shooting suit to spend a few days in the pleasant society gath- 
ered in the shade of the orange r trees and the pines. The Florida Press, which 
Mr. Charles Whitney, of New York, has established at St. Augustine, represents 
Northern sentiment, and in its pleasant editorial parlors gentlemen from all the 
Northern and Western States gather every morning to exchange opinions. 
Meantime the ladies are shopping in the tiny box-like shops in the toy streets. 
They buy rich stores of brilliant wings of flamingoes, or pink curlews (all the 
hues of the rainbow are found on the feathers of the Floridian birds) ; or they fill 
their pockets with alligators' teeth, curiously carved, or send home coquina vases, 
or box a young alligator a foot long, in Spanish moss, and express him North to 
a timid friend. Or they visit such superb orange groves as that of Dr. Ander- 
son, where eight hundred noble trees hang loaded with yellow fruit ; or visit the 
cemetery where repose Dade and the brave soldiers who lost their lives in the 
Seminole war, under the tomahawks of Osceola and his men; or peer into the two 
convents ; or at evening, when the sky near the horizon is filled with Daubigny- 
tints, wander on the beach, the warm, moist wind blowing across their faces, and 
the shells and brittle sea- weeds crackling beneath their feet. 

The war did not greatly impair St. Augustine. A few fine homes were 
destroyed, and much suffering and privation were caused by the removal to the 
Nassau river of such families as refused to take the oath of loyalty. The Federal 
Government obtained possession in 1862, and kept it. Of course many fortunes 
were completely broken, and scores of people in the town, as throughout Florida, 
are living in straitened circumstances doubly painful because they have never 
before known self-dependence. The town now has good educational facilities for 
white and black, although before the war it had none. The natives of St. Augustine 
rejoice as much as do the Northerners at the progress of the free and public 
schools. But in the back-country, so far as 1 could learn, there are neither 
school-houses, schools, nor sentiment in favor of either. 



26 



XLIII. 

THE CLIMATE OF FLORIDA — A JOURNEY TO PALATKA. 

THE climate of Florida is undoubtedly its chief charm. Its beauties and 
virtues have for a hundred years filled the homes of St. Augustine with 
people striving to recover from the effects of severer surroundings ; and it will 
always be a refuge. The equable temperature is one of the great excellences of 
the climate. The thermometer rarely falls below 30 degrees, or rises above 95 
degrees. The mean temperature of the winter months at St. Augustine, for 100 
years, according to the old Spanish records, averaged a little over 60 degrees. 
The climate of the State is of course varied, as it extends through six degrees of 
latitude. The greatest heats in summer are never equal to those experienced in 
New York and Boston. One writer, who is considered good authority, says that 
during his eighteen years of residence in Florida, the greatest heat was 96 degrees 
in the shade. The climate of the whole State from October to June has been 
characterized as " one continuous spring." Periods of cold or frost never last but 
a few hours, and rarely come, save in January, once or twice. The nights, 
whatever the character of the days preceding them, are always cool. Both the 
winter and summer weather in East Florida is delightful. The winters in that 
section are so mild that "the most delicate vegetables and plants of the Caribbean 
Islands," says one writer, " experience there not the least injury from the 
season ;" and the orange, the plantain, the banana, the guava, and the pine- 
apple attain a luxuriant growth. The medical statistics of the army show that 
the climate of the State as a whole ranks preeminent in point of salubrity. Solon 
Robinson, formerly the agricultural editor of the Tribune, who now resides at 
Jacksonville, tells me that he considers the climate of East Florida undoubtedly 
the best in the country. A general impression prevails in the North that on 
account of the large bodies of swamp land in the State, any one going there to 
reside, even temporarily, will incur danger of malarial disease. It is, however, 
established beyond controversy that there is never any danger from malaria in 
the winter months ; and that it is, to quote Mr. Robinson once more, " certainly 
no worse for immigrants from any of the Northern States than central New York 
was in its early settlement for those who went into the forests from New 
England." Despite the fact that there are malarial diseases which attack the 
careless and unacclimated who remain in the State through all the seasons, it is 
still true that even with the moribund from half-a-dozen harsh climates sent to 
her to care for, Florida can show cleaner bills of health than any other State in 
the Union. 

Frost reaches all parts of the State on rare occasions, but has seldom been 
known to go below latitude 27 degrees. It has sometimes visited Jacksonville 



THE CLIMATE OF FLORIDA. 399 

and other points along the St. John's river when the mercury stood at 40 
degrees. In Eastern Florida it rarely does damage to the sweet oranges, or the 
banana. In West Florida there is, say the authorities, " a constant struggle 
between the north-west wind and the trade-wind, and fruit growing incurs 
dangers." The seasons are the wet and the dry; the rains, which come with 
astonishing regularity at certain hours during the summer days, fall in heavy 
showers, and leave a cloudless sky behind them. There is rarely any rain during 
the winter months. Surgeon-General Lawson in one of his reports announces 
that while in the middle division of the United States the proportion is one death 
to thirty-six cases of remittent fever ; in the northern division, one to fifty- two ; 
in the southern division, one to fifty-four ; in Texas, one to seventy-eight ; and 
in California, one to one hundred and forty-eight, — in Florida it is only one to 
two hundred and eighty-seven. 

If a perfectly equable climate, where a soothing warmth and moisture com- 
bined prevail, be desirable for consumptives, it can be found nowhere in the 
Southern States, save in South-eastern Florida. The number of persons 
whom I. saw during my journey, who had migrated to the eastern or southern 
sections of the State many years before, — " more than half-dead with con- 
sumption," and who are now robust and vigorous, — was sufficient to convince 
me of the great benefits derived from a residence there. Physicians all agree 
that the conditions necessary to insure life to the consumptive are admirably pro- 
vided in the climatic resources of the peninsula. That great numbers of invalids 
find the localities along the St. John's river, and even on the coast, distressing to 
them, is said, by some physicians, to be due to the fact that those invalids go 
there after disease has become too deeply-seated. The European medical men 
are beginning to send many patients to Florida, cautioning them where to go. It 
would seem impossible for the most delicate invalid to be injured by a residence 
anywhere on the eastern or south-eastern coast from St. Augustine down. For 
those who, from various causes, find that each successive Northern winter, — with 
its constantly shifting temperature and its trying winds, which even the healthy 
characterize as "deadly," — saps their vitality more and more, Florida may be 
safely recommended as a home, winter and summer. For the healthy, and those 
seeking pleasure, it will become a winter paradise ; for the ailing it is a refuge 
and strength; for the severely invalided its results depend entirely upon choice 
of location and the progress which the disease has already made. The perfection 
of the Floridian winter climate is said to be obtained at Miami, near Key Bis- 
cayne bay, on the Miami river. There, among the cocoanuts and the mangroves, 
invalids may certainly count on laying a new hold upon life. 

Returning from St. Augustine to the St. John's river, I continued my journey 
southward from Tocoi, the terminus of the horse-railroad before mentioned. 
Over this road, by the way, thousands of Northern people journey yearly ; and 
the wharf, during the winter months, is crowded at the arrival and departure of 
the boats with fashionably dressed tourists, who seem strangely out of place in 
the semi-tropical forests. The "Florence," a sprightly steamer, brought me to 
Palatka early in the afternoon, affording all the way a delightful view of the wide 



400 



PALATKA, ON THE ST. JOHN'S RIVER. 



stream, on whose sun-transfigured breast the wild ducks were flushing their eager 
wings; and over which, now and then, flew the heron and the water- goose 
uttering strange cries. Dr. Westcott, at Tocoi (a gentleman who spent thirty- 
three years of his life in the Floridian forests, and who has once been Surveyor- 
General of the State), told me that the Spaniards called the river at that point 
Lake Valdes. One finds it wide and narrow alternately until Palatka is reached. 
There the stream has formed a broad lake, from which there seems no outlet 
whatever. Palatka is a very pretty town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, on the 
west bank. It is at the head of navigation for ocean steamers, and is character- 
ized by a richness of vegetation, and a mildness of climate which is not found at 
Jacksonville. It has become a favorite resort for the Northerners, and I found 
the Vermonters there in force. Colonel Hart, who went to Florida to die, some 

years ago, now owns fine prop- 
erties near and in Palatka, 
and has drawn around him the 
sterling New England thrift 
and management, of. which he 
is such an admirable example. 
Steamers arrive daily from 
North and South, and the 
facilities for travel are quite as 
numerous and as good as upon 
the Hudson. The consump- 
tives from the North return 
yearly to this vivifying and 
delicious climate, in which they 
find an arrest of Death's de- 
cree against them. 

At Palatka we first found 
the banana and the orange in 
their richest profusion, and 
noted what culture would do 
for them both. The town is 
backed by- an interminable 
pine forest, through which run but few roads ; but the ample space along the 
river front abounds in grand groves of oak, draped with the cool mosses, hung in 
most ravishingly artistic forms ; and the wild orange grows in the streets. This 
town has a cheery, neat, New England look; the white painted houses, with 
their porches nestling in vines and shrubbery, invite to repose. The two 
old-fashioned, roomy hotels (to one of which an immense wooden addition 
has been made) are cool and comfortable. 

The mornings in December, January, February and March, the four abso- 
lutely perfect months of Eastern Florida, are wonderfully soft and balmy ; the 
sun shines generously, but there is no suspicion of annoying heat. The breeze 
gently rustles the enormous leaves of the banana, or playfully tumbles a golden 




The Banana — "At Palatka we first found the banana in profusion. 



PALATKA BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR. 4O I 

orange to the ground, that a plump goose or duckling may at once thrust its bill 
into the tender fruit. The giant cactus in a neighboring garden peers out from 
amono- the fruit-trees like some scaly monster. The cart of the "cracker" (the 
native farmer's appellation), laden with game and vegetables, plies from door to 
door, and wild turkeys and dappled deer are purchased for dinner. Little parties 
lazily bestow themselves along the river bank, with books or sketching materials, 
and alternately work, doze, or gossip, until the whistles of the ascending or 
descending steamers are heard, when everybody flocks to the wharves. At 
evening a splendid white moonlight transfigures all the leaves and trees and 
flowers; the banjo and guitar, accompanying negro melodies, are heard in the 
streets ; a heavy tropical repose falls over the little town, its wharves and rivers. 

This was not always so. After the war was over, a few adventurous Yankees 
betook themselves to Palatka, but were not heartily received by the rude back- 
woodsmen and dubious " cracker" element which still lingered about there. In 
war time, 15,000 Union troops had been quartered at Palatka, and previous to 
that the town had on one occasion been bombarded. The Floridians had suffered 
a good deal, and there was severe enmity toward the "Yankees." The first 
attempt to open a hotel by a Northern man was severely resented. Parties of 
rough horsemen used to ride in and attempt to provoke a fight by sticking their 
bowie-knives in the hotel door. Shooting affrays were common. I was shown a 
spot where the sheriff himself tore up the turf during a fight of an hour or two 
with his own brothers-in-law, who were determined to kill him because he sup- 
ported the "Yankees," then gradually creeping in. Now and then a negro 
was massacred. 

The river's banks were sometimes the scene of terribly bloody affrays. Of 
course it was only the rougher classes who had a hand in this — people who rather 
objected to the march of civilization. It made them uncomfortable. Now the 
town is as peaceable as the mountain resorts in New Hampshire and Vermont. 
Property is good there, and has taken on prices which show a real demand for it. 
Three thousand dollars are asked for a little house and lot which would hardly 
bring any more in the North. But all the region adjacent to Palatka, and 
especially on the opposite side of the river, is getting settled up and cultivated. 



XLIV. 

ORANGE CULTURE IN FLORIDA — FERTILITY OF THE 

PENINSULA. 

JUST across the river from Palatka lies the beautiful orange grove owned by- 
Colonel Hart, in which seven hundred trees, some forty years old, annually 
bear an enormous crop of the golden fruit, and yield their owner an income of 
$12,000 or $15,000. The trees bear from twelve to twenty- five hundred oranges 
eacn ; some have been known to bear four or five thousand. The orchard 




"Just across the river from Palatka lies the beautiful orange grove owned by Colonel Hart." 

requires the care of only three men, an overseer and two negroes. The 
myriads of fish to be caught at any time in the river furnish material for compost 
heaps, with which the land is annually enriched. At the gateway of this superb 
orchard stand several grand bananas; entering the cool shade — some resplendent 
December day — one finds the negroes gathering the fruit into bags strapped at 
their sides, and bearing it away to storehouses where it is carefully packed for 
the steamers which are to bear it North. On the sand from which the hardy 
trunks of the orange spring there is a splendid checker- work of light and shade, 
and one catches through the interstices occasional p-limDses of the broad river 



ORANGE CULTURE IN FLORIDA. 4O3 

current. In an adjacent nursery, a hundred thousand young orange-trees await 
transplanting and "budding." 

This culture of oranges will certainly become one of the prime industries of 
Florida. The natives of the poorer class, who might make fortunes by turning 
their attention to it, are too idle to develop the country. They prefer to hunt 
and fish, and, as a rule, cannot be prevailed upon to undertake serious work. 
The mass of Northern men who undertook orange-raising directly after the war, 
failed because they did not employ skilled labor. The eastern bank of the river 
is considered safer than the western for the culture, as frosts rarely reach the 
former. But for many miles up and down the stream, the culture has proved 
reasonably successful on both sides. The property is becoming exceedingly 
good, yearly rising in value. Colonel Hart thinks his grove is worth at least 
$75,000. In a few years such establishments as those of Mr. Stockwell of Maine, 
with four hundred bearing- trees; Mr. Burr of Morristown, N. J.; the estate of 
Masters (two hundred trees); Mr. Brown, a New Yorker (two thousand young 
trees); Dr. Parsons, the Long Island nurseryman, and others adjacent to 
Colonel Hart's property, will yield fortunes to their owners. Connected with 
most of the orchards are many fine lemon and lime-trees. Colonel Dancey, six 
miles below Palatka, has a lemon grove of two hundred trees. Among the other 
noticeable groves below Palatka, are those of Dr. Cowgill, the State Comptroller; 
Colonel Cole of Orange Mills, who has some two thousand trees well started; 
Doctor Mays, at Orange Mills ; a number of New York gentlemen at Federal 
Point; that of Captain J. W. Stark, nearly opposite Orange Mills, and the fine 
estate of Captain Rossignol. 

Above Palatka, on the eastern banks, where the bluffs are quite high for 
Florida, and where the magnolia and water oak alternate charmingly with the 
cypress, the swamp-ash and the palm, there are also many successful orange 
groves scattered along from Rawlestown (where a hundred years ago an unsuc- 
cessful attempt was made to found an industrial retreat for the unfortunate 
women of London) to San Matteo, Murphy's Island, Buffalo Bluff, Welaka, and 
Beecher. There are many young groves on the Oclawaha river, and more than 
a million trees are already budded there. Before the war, acres of land covered 
with the wild orange were ruthlessly cleared to make room for cotton and cane. 
It is mainly Northern capital that is invested in orange culture throughout the 
State at present. In the Indian river region, the woods along the banks are, 
according to one account, "great gardens of the sour, wild orange, and we often," 
says the traveler, " had to clear the ground of vast quantities of the fruit before 
we could pitch our tents." These wild trees can be set out in new lands, and at 
a proper time budded with the sweet orange. Any time during 'the winter 
months is proper for transplanting. The " buds," or grafts, grow enormously the 
first year ; and, in five years at most, if one hundred transplanted trees have been 
set out on an acre, that acre will yield 10,000 oranges; next year the yield will 
be doubled, and in ten years from the date of transplanting, with anything like 
reasonable success, one is sure of an income for life. For the orange is a hardy 
tree, gives a sure crop, has few insect enemies, and lives for more than a hundred 



404 



THE INDIAN RIVER — FRUIT CULTURE IN GENERAL. 




Entrance to Colonel Hart's Orange Grove, opposite Palatka. 



years. A good tree will bear from one thousand to three thousand oranges yearly. 
Some of the trees in an orchard at Mandarin have produced as many as 5,500, 
many of the oranges weighing nearly a pound each. One single grove on the 

Indian river, with 1,350 trees, pro- 
duced in a season 700,000 oranges. 
Only a small capital is needed for 
the starting of a grove, and the re- 
wards of a successful one are very 
great. Oranges sell at from $25 to 
$68 per thousand in Jacksonville, and 
are readily salable in any of the 
Atlantic seaports. When the neces- 
sary dredging and building of canals 
has been accomplished, so that the 
Indian river may have an outlet via 
St. John, the North will be supplied 
with oranges of more delicate texture 
than any it has yet seen ; and the 
number of groves along the river will 
be legion. 

The fitness of Florida for the 
growth of tropical and semi-tropical 
fruits is astonishing. Not only do the 
orange, the lemon, the lime, and the citron flourish there, but the peach, the 
grape, the fig, the pomegranate, the plum, all varieties of berries, the olive, the 
banana, and the pine -apple grow luxuriantly. Black Hamburg and white; 
Muscat grapes fruit finely in the open air; the Concord and the Scuppernong 
are grown in vast quantities. The guava, the tamarind, the wonderful alliga- 
tor-pear, the plantain, the cocoanut, and the date, the almond and the pecan 
luxuriate in Southern Florida. We have within our boundaries a tropic land, 
rich and strange, which will one day be inhabited by thousands of fruit-growers, 
and where beautiful towns, and perhaps cities, will yet spring up. 

Nothing can be more beautiful than one of the Floridian cottages, surrounded 
with a flourishing grove of orange-trees. That of Dr. Moragne, at Palatka, is 
one of the best examples. Down at the river front the good doctor has a long; 
row of flourishing bananas, beyond which the great river is spread out — a gentle 
lake — before him. From his porch he looks upon several acres of noble trees, 
with thousands of oranges nestling among the dark green leaves. They come 
without care ; one man picks them and prepares them for market, and they leave 
a golden, or, at least, a paper harvest annually behind them. Some of the 200 
trees within the doctor's inclosure yearly produce 3,000 to 4,000 oranges, and 
will go on their round of blossom and fruit for half a century.* 

* The Union officer in command at Palatka during the war was ordered to destroy all the 
trees around the town for military purposes. He could not find it in his heart to ruin Dr. 
Moragne's beautiful grove ; so he picketed his cavalry there, and evaded the order. 



THE FERTILITY OF FLORIDA LANDS. 4O5 

Palatka was an Indian trading post in 1835. The Government built a road 
thence to Tampa, and kept a guard upon it, in the days when the Seminoles were 
still vigorous in their warfare. There are now but few Indians left in the State, 
and they, though peacefully inclined, remain buried in the Everglades, or among 
the forests of Indian river. Great numbers of them were ignominiously hunted 
down at various periods after the wars, and rewards were set upon their heads as 
if they had been criminals. Soldiers wers employed, or induced, by the hope of 
money, to follow them into their remotest fastnesses, and to disperse them. Now 
an occasional warrior, scantily clad, and dejected in appearance, is at rare inter- 
vals seen in some of the towns. 

At Palatka one may gain a good idea of what culture and the advent of 
ambitious Northerners can do for Florida. There are so many superior induce- 
ments offered by the peninsula to those in search of new abiding-places, that I 
must content myself with a brief summing up of each. I suppose that the average 
observer, unfamiliar with the character of a sub-tropical country, would traverse 
the peninsula constantly remarking that he had never before seen so much good-for- 
nothing land. The eternal pine woods in many sections would prepossess him 
unfavorably; he would not even appreciate the exceeding richness of the 
hummocks until he had been instructed in their qualities. The lands of the 
State are usually classified into hummocks, pine, and swamp. Through the 
first-rate pine lands, where forests of pitch and yellow pine grow rankly, runs 
a dark vegetable mould, under which lies a chocolate-colored sandy loam, mixed 
with limestone pebbles, and resting on a substratum of marl. Lands of this 
class are so fertile that they have yielded 400 pounds of long staple cotton to 
the acre for fourteen successive years without any fertilizing. The second-rate 
pine lands offer excellent pasturage, and, when re-enforced, will yield 3,000 
pounds of sugar to the acre. Upon them also can be grown oranges, lemons, 
and Cuba tobacco. Even the poorest pine lands have been found admirably 
adapted to the growth of hemp, and also give a good income from the naval 
stores which the trees yield. 

Throughout these pine lands, at intervals of a few miles, there are hummocks 
of every size, varying from an acre or two to tracts of 20,000 or 30,000. These are 
wonderfully rich, and persons wishing to cultivate them can choose their resi- 
dences on the higher pine lands, where there will be no danger of malarial fevers, 
and only spend their days among the hummocks. The low hummocks are 
very fertile, and before the war were the seats of many fine sugar plantations. 
The high hummocks are considered among the best lands in Florida ; their 
fertility is really extraordinary, and the only preparation which they need for the 
production of luxuriant crops is clearing and ploughing, while, in addition, the 
low hummocks require draining. 

The swamp lands of the peninsula are still, as it were, in process of formation, 
and are thought to be of even more durable fertility than the hummocks. They 
are of alluvial formation, occupying basins into which immense deposits of decay- 
ing vegetable matter have been washed from higher lands. Some astonishing 
results in sugar-planting have been obtained in those swamps. Four hogsheads 



406 FLORIDA AS A PRODUCER. 

to the acre were produced near New Smyrna, in East Florida, a production 
which completely overtops that of Louisiana. While Texas and Louisiana cane- 
planters are obliged to cut their cane in October, because of early frost, in Florida 
it may stand unharmed until late in December. Vast bodies of these swamp 
lands are now lying untilled in Florida, and may be had at two dollars per acre. 
In Leroy county alone there are said to be 100,000 acres of the best kind of 
sugar-land.* 

While the tracts along the St. John's river are not considered extraordinary 
in point of fertility, still, within a mile of the banks, there are thousands of acres 
of fine hummock land which might be tilled with great profit. The counties of 
Middle Florida offer abundant high hummock lands ; so do many counties in the 
eastern section. As soon as production begins in earnest the producer will 
learn to appreciate the advantageous situation of Florida. Lying directly across 
one of the great highways of traffic, and within a day and a-half of New Orleans, 
three days of New York, and one of Cuba, by steamer; with such harbors as 
Tampa, Fernandina, Pensacola, Cedar Keys and Charlotte, and with reasonably 
good means of internal communication by road, and superb ones by river, the 
State has no reason to complain. Cotton was, of course, the principal staple 
before the war ; but a great variety of production will henceforth be the rule. 
Indian corn will grow throughout the State, and has been liberally raised, 
although not yet in sufficient quantities to supply the home demand. Fruit and 
vegetable culture along the lines of the rivers, with reference to the Northern 
markets, is becoming one of the principal industries. The culture of cotton at 
present does not pay in the State; and the production, which in i860 amounted 
to 63,000 bales of ginned cotton, is gradually decreasing. Sugar-cane is one of 
the great hopes of the commonwealth. It is confidently asserted that the yield 
of this staple in Florida is twice that of Louisiana. Solon Robinson says that 
" small farmers can grow cane upon any good pine land, and can make sugar as 
easily as Yankee farmers make cider." He evidently does not believe that the 
successful culture of the cane is inseparable from the old plantation system. 
Rice, indigo, silk, coffee, tea, and the ramie plant are likely to be among the 
other agricultural interests of Florida. The palmetto, scattered so luxuriantly 
through Florida, is now extensively used in the manufacture of paper, and forms 
the basis of a great industry. On the entire coast are excellent locations for salt 
works, and at the commencement of the war, large works had been established 
on Key West Island for the manufacture of salt by solar evaporation. Along 
the coast, too, there is such a multitude of oysters, fish, and game, that enter- 
prises for supplying the market from that section should be very successful. The 
turtle and the fish are celebrated everywhere ; and the Indian river oyster 
deserves a ballad to his charms by some noted gastronomer. 

The natural resources for fertilizers are abundant in the State. From the 
swamp lands may always be had a muck which serves admirably, and the clay 
itself, which lies next to the sandy soil in a large part of the State, is a fine 
fertilizer when mixed directly. There are also immense accumulations of shells, 

* See Adams on Florida. 



EXPENSE OF BUILDING RENTS. 



407 



of the periwinkle and conch, which are well calculated to strengthen land, and 
deposits of green marl are easily accessible. 

The expense of building is very slight in Florida, for the houses need none of 
the plastering and weather-tightening so necessary in Northern climates. Simple 
houses, cellarless, and raised some two feet from the ground on posts, with large, 
airy rooms, battened instead of plastered, and surrounded by verandas, are best 
adapted to the climate. In the towns, as a rule, rents' are rather high, owing to 
the lack of building during the past perturbed years. 



te' 




The Guardian Angel. 



XLV. 

UP THE OCLAWAHA TO SILVER SPRING. 

THE Oclawaha is a small stream running through swamps and still lakes 
in Putnam and Marion counties. It empties into the St. John's about 
twenty-five miles south of Palatka, and opposite the settlement called We-la-ka. 
The river took its name from that of one of the seven clans of Seminoles who 
once wandered through the swamps which border it, and hunted in the 
beautiful lakes above it. It is but a few years since the stream was rendered 
navigable, and to-day its mouth is so embowered in foliage — such great curtains 
of vines and water plants overhanging it — that the passer-by on the St.John's 
would hardly notice it. Boats leave Jacksonville and Palatka every Thursday 
for Lake Griffin, and, traversing the whole forest range through which the 
Oclawaha runs, furnish the traveler with an admirable opportunity to see some 
of the most remarkable lowland scenery in the world. 

The invalid from the North, anxious to escape not only from the trying 
climate which has increased his malady, but also the memories of the busy 
world to which he has been accustomed, could not do better than to drift up and 
down this remote and secluded stream, whose sylvan peace and perfect beauty 
will bring him the needed repose. Some years since, an enterprising Yankee, 
familiar with the charms of the little river, conceived the project of a floating 
hotel to constantly make trips between Palatka, on the St. John's, and the 
Silver Spring, one of the most beautiful resorts on the Oclawaha, but until this 
mammoth project is put into execution the traveler must content himself with 
the wheezy little steamboats which lazily mount the current, or must come in 
his own yacht. 

Yachting on the Oclawaha and St. John's rivers would certainly be prime 
amusement in the winter season. There are some curious characters along the 
little stream, — hunters and trappers, who have spent many years in the woods and 
swamps, and who could teach the amateur sportsman how to hunt the alligator 
in his lair, to snare the turtle, and now and then to shoot a noble wild turkey. 
If neither the floating hotel nor the new line of steamers is placed on this 
charming water-way, it is to be hoped that large caravansaries for fashion- 
able visitors may be erected at such lovely resorts as Silver Spring and Ocala. 
The hotel accommodations in the interior of Florida are generally far from 
excellent, but the tide of travel which is beginning to penetrate even to 
the remotest corners of the peninsula will soon cause the establishment of 
hotels which will be thoroughly satisfactory to Northern and foreign visitors. 
The whole Oclawaha region had not been properly explored until toward 



THE STEAMER 



'MARION. 



409 



1867, although many travelers who had penetrated as far as the then supposed 
head of navigation, had told strange and seemingly exaggerated stories of its 
wonderful beauty. The tales of floating islands, of the grandeur and almost 
frightful calm of the mighty swamps — of the curious colonies of birds and 







A Peep into a Forest on the Oclawaha. 

animals — the superb lakes, and the lucent waters,had thrilled many a brain; but 
only a few had penetrated these watery, sylvan retreats until the prying Northern 
element demanded to be shown all. Now a journey up the Oclawaha is as 
fashionable as a promenade on the Rhine, and really more interesting and 
amusing. 

Our party embarked at Palatka on the little steamer " Marion," one cool 
evening, just after the arrival of the boat from Charleston; and while the officers 
of her huge sister were still shouting themselves hoarse with commands to the 
slouching negroes about them, our tiny bark slipped out into the broad current, 
and set slowly off midstream at the rate of four miles an hour, for a journey to 
Silver Spring. Although cool, it was not uncomfortable, and one was from time 
to time startled, as on the Mediterranean, by a warm breath across his face, per- 
fumed with the scent of oranges and the rich forest growth. The lights of 
cottages along the banks blinked cheerily; occasionally a descending steamer 
yelled her warning, and we blundered leisurely forward, still in the, great stream 
when midnight came, and sleepily sought the tiny cabins allotted us. 

It must have been two o'clock in the morning when I was awakened by a 
violent brushing and scraping noise, as if the boat were held fast amid the boughs 



4io 



TORCHLIGHT 7N A FLORIDA FOREST. 



of trees. Lazily gazing out of the cabin I saw, with surprise, the bough of a 
stout shrub entering the window, then vanishing with a shriek and a whisk, as if 
it had merely looked in to frighten me. 

The whole thicket was lighted up as by some supernatural agency. I saw 
giant cypresses, their dirty white trunks seeming about to topple down upon 
me ; saw acres of glimmering water, in which the mysterious light cast a thou- 
sand fantastic gleams, which shifted uneasily every moment ; saw the cypress- 
knees dotting the thicket in every direction ; saw lovely green vines, liter- 
ally spangled with white and blue flowers, and arrayed in such dense and 
symmetrical masses that I could not persuade myself they grew wild in the 
thicket ; saw a heron sitting, low-perched, on a shrub ; and saw the flash of 
wings, as from time to time our advancing boat's monotonous refrain of sighs 
from its two steam-pipes startled the birds reposing in the tree-tops. 

The red-bay, the holly, the ash, the maple, the cypress, toujours the cypress, 
floated before my half-closed eyes; then vines again, then more birds, — won- 
dered if I should see an alligator — what they would have for breakfast — another 
tree coming in at my window — "Look out thar, Bill, for them torches! " and at 
that point, I think, I fell asleep again. 

In the morning it was all explained. I had awakened just after we had 
entered the Oclawaha, and had seen the glare of the torches by which we groped 
our way in the narrow channel filled with spring-water. Had we entered in the 




'III!! 1 ! .,. 

"We would brush past the trees and vines." [Page 411.] 

day-time, I should have seen immense floating islets of lilies and barnets, gently 
swayed by the tremulous currents, and hundreds of light-footed birds poising 
airily upon them ; the haughty kingfisher diving for his prey ; the wild turkey 



SCENES ALONG THE OCLAWAHA. 411 

uttering his startled cry ; the crane making himself as invisible as possible, by- 
shrinking until he seemed merely a feather- ball; and the rose-colored curlew rising 
into the air like a flash of light from a ruby. Then, too, I should have noted the 
rafts of cypress-trees, girded together with bark and palmetto strings, and as we 
approached the shores, might have caught sight of the wrinkle-throated alligator 
wagging his huge tail cheerily in the sunshine. 

All day we wound in and out of the recesses of this delicious forest. The 
banks of the stream were scarcely thirty feet apart, as a rule, although sometimes 
the current broadened to twice that width. We were perpetually coming to a 
point in the forest from which there seemed no possible egress, when, rounding a 
sharp corner, the negro boatmen pushing with their long poles, we would brush 
past the trees and vines, and once more plod on by cypress, water oak, ash, and 
orange-tree. 

The richly variegated colors of the far-extending thickets were mirrored 
so completely in the water, that we seemed suspended or floating over an 
enchanted forest. The clumps of saplings garnished with vines ; the stately 
bosquets of palms, now growing a score together on a little hillock, and now 
standing apart, like sentinels ; the occasional magnolias ; the long swamp-ways 
out of which barges, rowed by negroes, would come to receive the mail, and 
into which they vanished again, the oarsmen hardly exchanging a word with our 
captain ; the fierce-faced, bearded men, armed with rifles and revolvers, who 
sometimes hailed us from a point of land, to know if we "wanted any meat," 
and showed us deer and turkeys, and perhaps the skin. of a gray wolf or a black 
bear, — all these novelties of the tropics and the backwoods kept us in perplexed 
wonder. When evening came slowly on again, a round moon silvered the water, 
and enabled us to see even the ducks that floated half submerged, and curiously 
eyed our little boat. By day, one sees hundreds of turtles, as on the St. John's, 
sunning themselves. The birds are legion. They chatter in the tree-tops ; 
they offer themselves freely as marks for revolver-bullets ; they scold at night as 
the torchlight awakes them ; and they accompany the echo of each unsuccessful 
shot with loud derisive singing. 

The torches of pine-knots placed securely on the boat's roof, and watched 
there by a habile negro boy, aid the reflection in the water to a new beauty. 
The cypresses seem more ghostly; the vines more luxuriant; the long-necked 
white birds more comical ; the palms more majestic than by day. Now and then 
a beacon disclosed some lonely cabin, thatched with palmetto, beside which stood 
a solitary figure with gun strapped over his back. " Got any terbacker, Cap'n?" 
or some such question, and we left the figure behind. Penetrating Eureka 
creek, we wormed our way through a little streamlet only twenty feet wide. At 
Fort Brooke, large quantities of the rich crops of Alachua county were formerly 
shipped, but the railroad now transports them. 

A little above Fort Brooke one comes to Orange creek, the outlet of a charm- 
ing lake, in Masson and Alachua counties, with lovely orange groves upon its 
banks and sulphur springs near by. In conversation with people who came and 
went at the wayside stations in the swamps, I found that they had all been well- 



412 



SILVER SPRING, THE "FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. 



to-do "before" the war, and that they were healthy and happy in their tropic 
wilderness home. The needs of Florida in the lines of canals and convenient 
short-cuts were well exemplified in the case of a planter from the St. John's river, 
who, with some friends, was going on a hunting excursion near Silver Spring. 
From his home on the St. John's by land across to Silver Spring, it was only at 
best forty miles ; but by the only practicable route he was compelled to travel 
175 miles, and spend three entire days on the road. 

Silver Spring is certainly one of the wonders of the world. The tradition 
that it is the "Fountain of Youth," of which the aborigines spoke so enthusiast- 
ically to Ponce de Leon, seems firmly founded. The river or spring rises suddenly 




The "Marion" at Silver Spring. 

from the ground, and after running nine miles through foliage-shrouded banks, 
more luxuriantly beautiful than poet's wildest dream, empties into the Oclawaha. 
Transparent to the very bottom, the waters show one, at the depth of thirty or 
forty feet, the bottom of this wonderful basin, with bubbles here and there 
denoting one of the sources ; and the refraction of the rays of light produces 
most brilliant effects. 

We rowed about on the bosom of this fairy spring, quite overcome with the 
strangeness of the scene. There is nothing like it elsewhere either in Europe or 
America ; the foliage is even more gorgeously tropical than along the Oclawaha, 
and its arrangement is more dainty and poetic. We spent hours rocking in little 
skiffs among the oases of lily pods which extend along the borders of the spring ; 
or in threading the forests which set boldly out into the tranquil stream, not 



SILVER SPRING TO OKAHUMKEE LAKE APOPKA. 413 

without occasional misgivings as to the quantity and temper of the alligators that 
might be lurking there. 

Nothing befell us, save headaches from the too zealous sun. The ther- 
mometer confessed to 90 degrees, and the little boat seemed to bake as she lay 
at the wharf receiving cotton bales and bags of cotton-seed from Ocala, Marion 
county's principal town, and from its surroundings. The planters and the 
negroes from the neighborhood, each superintending the loading of his own 
cotton, formed a lively group under the wharf- shed at Silver Spring. The tiny 
steamer was by no means equal to the task demanded of it, and left great quan- 
tities of freight awaiting its return. Half concealed among the tall, rustling 
flags, we sat in our boat watching the grimy negroes as they tussled with the 
cotton ; the young Floridians practicing at the curlews and the herons with 
their revolvers ; and the wonderful dreamy green of the foliage, through which 
peered hundreds of strange plants and flowers. 

Silver Spring was once considered the head of navigation in this direction, but 
steamers now run far beyond it on the Oclawaha, through lakes Griffin, Eustis, 
Harris, and Dora, to Okahumkee, a little settlement in the wilderness, where 
sportsmen delight to spend much of their time while in the peninsula. All the 
lands near the lakes are specially valuable for cane-growing, and for cotton, corn 
and fruit. In the vicinity of Lake Harris, frost is seldom known ; and sugar- 
cane matures so as to tassel, which the early frost never permits it to do in 
Louisiana and Texas. 

Colonel Hart, of Palatka, was the explorer of this region, and when his 
adventurous steamer pushed up through the encumbered channel, the crew had 
to combat sunken logs, fallen trees, and labyrinths of overhanging limbs. Then 
" floating islands " were encountered, formed of water-flags securely rooted in a 
soil under which the current had made its way. These islands are sometimes 
borne down into the larger streams by the winds and the rising of the waters ; 
and those which had become stationary in the river channel were so tough that 
a saw was required to cut them in pieces. 

This whole lake region seems gradually becoming a marsh, and much labor 
and expense is required to keep the channel open as far as Okahumkee. A pro- 
ject for cutting a canal through to the Gulf by this route, taking advantage of the 
lakes and their outlets, has been conceived, and would be of great commercial 
importance to Florida. The country around Lake Apopka, the source of the 
Oclawaha river, is considered one of the most remarkable in Florida, and 
cannot fail when communication is more thoroughly established, to attract large 
numbers of immigrants. At Okahumkee the waters divide, running into the 
Gulf by way of Lake Pansoffkee and the Withlacoochee rivers — the route of the 
contemplated ship canal across the State. The Oclawaha is navigable for about 
250 miles, and a semi-weekly line of small steam-packets gives the up-country 
connection with the outer world. A charter has been obtained for the " Great 
Southern " railroad to run from Augusta, Georgia, via Millen and Jessup in that 
State, to Jacksonville in Florida — thence to Palatka, and soon to Key Biscayne 
Bay and Key West. A large land grant from the State has been accorded the 
27 



4H 



WHAT THE CAPTAIN OF THE "MARION" SAID, 



projectors, and the work of laying down the track from Jessup to Jacksonville 
has been contracted. 

Our captain, the cheery and active skipper of the " Marion," had navigated 
the Oclawaha river for nearly a quarter of the century, and his pilot, formerly 
his slave, still stands at the helm, a post requiring no small skill in view of the 
sharp turns which the " Marion" is compelled to make to avoid being ignomini- 
ously stuck fast in the swamp thickets. The captain expressed himself better 
satisfied, on the whole, with free than slave labor; thought that it released 




Shooting at Alligators. I Page 413.] 

employers like himself from a great many obligations. But he said that the 
sudden advent of emancipation had greatly hindered the development of hun- 
dreds of plantations along the Oclawaha, chiefly because the planters did not 
wish to encourage more negroes to come into the country, as they were already 
so formidable a political element. Planters cannot work their broad acres without 
the very immigration which they dread, and so they suffer them to lie idle. But 
industrial progress had been very marked in many things since the war. A few 
manufactories scattered through some of the rich counties traversed by these 
steamers would, he thought, add greatly to the wealth of those sections. People 
suffered a great deal from the large prices which they were obliged to pay for 



AN ALLIGATOR HUNTER'S STORY. 415 

manufactured articles brought many hundreds of miles, in a toilsome manner, 
from the outer world. 

Sailing back, we were treated to the sight of an alligator fifteen feet long, 
sunning himself on a hummock of yellow grass. The wrinkle underneath his 
lower jaw gave him a good-humored look, and he seemed actually to smile as 
the bullets hissed around him. The alligator is by no means a trifling enemy ; 
and the Floridian tells strange stories of the creature's strength, fleetness, and 
strategy. An alligator hunter in Jacksonville gave me an idea of these character- 
istics, somewhat after the following fashion : 

" The 'gaiter, sir, is ez quick as lightning, and ez nasty. He kin outswim a 
deer, and he hez dun it, too ; he swims more 'n two-thirds out o' water, and 
when he ketches you, sir, he jest wabbles you right over 'n over, a hundred times, 
or mo', sir, ez quick ez the wind ; and you 're dead in no time, sir. When a dog 
sees one he always begins to yelp, sir, for a 'gaiter is mighty fond of a dog and a 
nigger, sir. Nobody can't tell how old them old fellows is, sir; I reckon nigh on 
to a hundred years, them biggest ones. Thar 's some old devils in them lagoons 
you see off the St. John ; they lie thar very quiet, but it would be a good tussle 
if one of you was out thar in a small boat, sir. They won't always fight ; some- 
times they run away very meek ; the best way to kill 'em is to put a ball in the 
eye, sir ; thar 's no use in wasting shot in a 'gaiter's hide. When the boys wants 
sport, sir, they get a long green pole, and sharpen it; 'n then they find a 'gaiter's 
hole in the marsh, and put the pole down it ; then the 'gaiter he snaps at it, 'n 
hangs on to it, 'n the boys get together, 'n pull him out, 'n put a rope aroun' his 
neck and set him to fightin' with another 'gaiter. O Lord ! reckon t' would 
make yo' har curl to see the tails fly." 



XLVI. 



THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S — INDIAN RIVER — KEY WEST — POLITICS. 

THE NEW CONSTITUTION. 

SOUTHWARD and up the St. John's river from Palatka, the vegetation becomes 
more tropical, the river narrowing so that one can comfortably inspect the 
thickets, and widening out only to be merged in grand Lake George, twelve 
miles wide, Dexter's Lake, and Lake Monroe, at Enterprise. The steamers make 
the run from Palatka to Enterprise in about twelve hours. In March, when the 
flowers on the banks are at their perfection, if the moonlight be brilliant, do not 




View on the Upper St. John's River, Florida. 



neglect the journey by night. The glamour of the Southern moon throws an 
enchantment over all the splendid foliage which makes it doubly bewitching; the 
lilies and barnets on the water, and the palms and cypresses on shore, form perfect 
pictures which none can forget. Welaka, opposite the mouth of the Oclawaha, 
was well supplied with accommodations for visitors before the war destroyed them. 
There is a grand hotel there now, near some excellent sulphur springs; and 
Dunn's Lake, abounding in game, and with many rich plantations on its shores is 



INDIAN RIVER THE SPORTSMAN'S PARADISE. j\\J 

but eight miles distant. At the southern end of Lake George lies Drayton's 
Island, where it is said there are some remarkable Indian mounds. A barren rib 
of land divides the St. John's and the lake from the Oclawaha. The steamers 
dexterously skim over the dangerous bar at the southern extremity of Lake 
George, and passing Volusia and Fort Butler, a noted relic of the Indian wars, 
enter Dexter's Lake, surrounded by its wild and seemingly limitless marshes and 
hummocks. Beyond this lake, the river flows through a very narrow channel, 
whose banks are clothed with the omnipresent palm, the maiden cane, and the tall 
sedge in the meadows. At Lake Monroe, one lands at Enterprise, where a Maine 
man keeps a hotel, of which, and one or two other houses, the town consists. 
This is a famous rendezvous for sportsmen who are about to visit the Indian river. 
On the opposite shore is Mellonville, a promising settlement. All along this lake 
there is superb hunting and fishing ; and the invalid who comes pale and racked 
with a harrowing cough, is, after a few weeks, seen tramping about in the cool of 
the -morning with gun and fishing rod, a very Nimrod and Walton combined. 

The source of the St. John is higher up, in some unknown marsh, and after 
one has penetrated to Lake Harney and Salt Lake, there is little left to see on 
the noble stream which, at a distance of nearly three hundred miles from its 
mouth, flows within seven miles of the ocean into which it empties. 

Indian river is difficult of access, but swarms of travelers are now finding 
their way there. One of the favorite means of reaching it is to row from Enter- 
prise to Lake Harney, and to take a portage across to Sand Point. The entrance 
from the coast is decidedly less easy than from the St. John's ; the deepest of 
the outlets, Fort Pierce channel, having rarely more than seven feet of water at 
high tide. The so-called river is really an arm of the sea; its waters are salt; 
its westward shore was once very highly cultivated by the Spaniards, and it 
could, with a little renewed attention, be made one of the richest garden spots 
in America. The westward side presents a sad panorama of ruined sugar plan- 
tations and houses, of superb machinery lying idle — and of acres of wild orange- 
trees, which only need transplanting and budding to produce fruit equal to 
the best which we receive from Havana. The sportsman who pitches his tent 
for a few days on the splendid camping ground of this same shore, will see the 
pelican, the cormorant, the sea-gull, and gigantic turtles, many of them weighing 
five hundred pounds ; may see the bears exploring the nests for turtles' eggs ; 
may " fire-hunt " the deer in the forests ; chase the alligator to his lair ; shoot 
at the " raft-duck," and fish from the salt-ponds all finny monsters that be. 
Hardly a thousand miles from New York, one may find the most delicate and 
delightful tropical scenery, and may dwell in a climate which neither Hawaii nor 
Southern Italy can excel. Settlements throughout this section are few and far 
between. The mail is carried down the great silent coast by a foot-messenger — 
for there is a stretch of nearly one hundred miles along which there is not a drop 
of fresh water for a horse to drink. 

The islands extending along the south coast, from Cape Florida to the " Dry 
Tortugas," lie close to the Gulf Stream, and between the mainland and the 
dangerous reefs on which so many vessels are annually wrecked. They are only 



4-lS BISCAYNE BAY THE LABOR QUESTION — KEY WEST. 

a few feet above tide-water, and are wooded with the mangrove, the bay, the 
palmetto, the oak, the cocoa and the pine-apple tree, all of which thrive in the 
rocky soil of these keys. A large trade is here carried on in the gathering of 
sponges and turtles. The traveler in search of health will find a pleasant recre- 
ation in sailing about Biscayne Bay, and penetrating thence into the vast 
shallow lakes of the " Everglades," where a thousand islands are covered with a 
wealth of live oaks and cocoas', and with masses of trailing vines, on which, in 
the season, hang gigantic clusters of grapes. There one may see miles of flower- 
beds, where every conceivable hue greets the eye; and will find some of the rich- 
est lands in the world lying idle, and to be purchased for a trifle. North of 
Biscayne Bay, on the coast, tobacco, bananas, plantains, oranges, coffee, dates, 
pine-apples, rice, indigo, sugar and cassava will flourish admirably. The produc- 
tion of sea-island cotton on the Florida coast requires but about one-half the 
labor necessary in South Carolina, and it is contended that a sugar plantation 
there can be made for one-fifth of the money required in Louisiana. Biscayne 
Bay is within four days' easy sail of New York, and there is no reason why 
vegetables and the great variety of tropical fruits which can be grown there 
should not find a ready market in the metropolis. 

Of course, the labor question in Florida, as elsewhere in the Southern States, 
is perplexing and startling. The only means by which the State can secure the 
full development of its extraordinary riches is by inducing immigration on the 
part of people who live in similar latitudes, and who will find it agreeable and 
easy to develop the resources of the vast sub- tropical peninsula. While it is 
evident that Northern and Western people will develop the region bordering 
on the St. John's, and possibly the northern part of the commonwealth, those 
who do the work on the vast sugar plantations of the future, and who develop 
the whole south-eastern coast, must be native to the South. The Floridians 
have already given some attention to the subject of immigration, and a bureau 
to take charge of that matter was appointed under the new Constitution. The 
"Agricultural and Immigration Association of Florida" was organized in 1868, 
and is composed of the officers of the county associations of the same nature, 
and of those of the various boards of trade. 

Key West, only a short distance from Cuba, is an important Government 
naval station, and is connected with the world by semi-monthly steamship to 
Baltimore, Havana, and New Orleans ; semi-weekly to Galveston and New York, 
and by the United States dispatch boats to Fort Jefferson, Tampa, Cedar Keys, 
St. Mark's, Appalachicola, Pensacola, and Mobile. One may stand on a cracker- 
box and look over the whole island, which is formed of a species of coralline 
limestone. Key West town is prettily situated amid " groves of cocoa and of 
palm ;" has five thousand inhabitants ; becomes quite lovely in aspect when the 
fleet rendezvous is fixed there ; is famous for the beauty of its ladies, the match- 
less flavor of its green-turtle, the dexterity of its wreckers, the extent of its salt 
works and cigar manufactories, its naval hospital and its formidable Fort Taylor, 
with two hundred heavy guns pointing seaward. All winter long at Key West* 
* The name Key West is a corruption of the Spanish Cayo Hueso, "Bone Key." 



POLITICS IN FLORIDA. 4-19 

the south winds blow; the air is loaded with warmth and perfume; the moonlight 
is brilliant, and the " northers " considerately come only two or three times a 
year. From this port steamers run occasionally to the Dry Tortugas, where 
a thousand prisoners were confined during the war, and where the " conspirators " 
found a forced seclusion. 

Florida accepted reconstruction peacefully, and the new Constitution is, on the 
whole, a good one. It makes proper provision for schools, and the management of 
the courts and the provisions with regard to the distribution of lands are wise. 






Sunrise at Enterprise, St. John's River, Florida. 

The Republican party of the State has suffered a good deal at the hands of some 
of the men who have been intrusted with its interest, so that many citizens of 
the State who, on national questions, always vote with Republicans, array them- 
selves so far as regards their local interests with the Conservative faction. The 
balance of power in the State is at present held by the blacks, led by a few white 
men; but the Conservative element is rapidly gaining strength, and it is noted as 
somewhat remarkable that Northerners who settle there gradually find them- 
selves leaning to Conservatism, as they are compelled to do to protect themselves 
against a torrent of ignorance and vice. Congressman Cox, of New York, was 
one day at a Republican meeting at Jacksonville, and was invited to address it. 
He professed great surprise, and inquired how it was "that a Democrat was 
asked to make an address in a Republican caucus?" He was thereupon informed 
that it was not a party meeting, but that it was an effort to secure the best men 
and the best ideas for the service of the State, even if they were found outside 
party limits. There has been a great deal of fraud and plundering on the part of 
county officers who, dazzled by the possession of newly acquired power, have not 
hesitated to put both hands into the public purse. Many have been detected, 
but some have been so adroit as to completely cloak their iniquities. A firm and 
thoroughly honest administration of State affairs would bring Florida into front 
rank among the prosperous States in a short time. 

Taxation is about $2.38 on every hundred, but the property owner is allowed 
to fix his own valuation. This includes a school and county tax amounting to 
one cent on a dollar. The various railroad enterprises into which the State has 
been urged have done considerable to embarrass it. The present State debt is 
nearly $1,350,000, exclusive of a contingent liability of $4,000,000 of bonds, 



420 RAILROAD MATTERS — PROGRESS OF EDUCATION. 

issued by the State to those insincere adventurers who pretended that they 
desired to complete the Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile railroad. This 
important route is now finished to the town of Chattahoochee, in Florida, the 
location of the State Penitentiary. The road would be of great advantage to 
the State, if it were possible to get it freed from the endless litigation surround- 
ing it, and to put even the section which is already completed into decent 
running order. 

It was an enterprise of too much magnitude for the capital or the management 
of the clever adventurer who got it into his possession, and who obtained every- 
thing that he desired from the reconstruction legislature. He having sunk 
beneath its weight, without having made the tremendous progress anticipated, 
the project languishes. An act of the last Legislature but one has prohibited 
the further issuing of bonds for any purpose whatever. The Administration 
of Governor Stearns has thus far been satisfactory. 

At the period of my visit to Florida, the State Superintendent of Education 
was a negro, and a gentleman of considerable culture and capacity. But neither 
he nor his predecessors had succeeded in doing much for common schools. The 
same prejudice which existed against them elsewhere in the South was felt in 
Florida up to a very recent date ; and possibly exists in some degree now, 
because of the lurking fear of the whites that some day mixed schools may be 
insisted upon by the black masters of the situation. In such counties as Duval, 
where the influence of a large and flourishing town has been felt, there are many 
schools, well supplied and well taught ; but as a rule, throughout the back- 
country, there are no schools, and there is no immediate prospect of any. The 
scrip which came to Florida, as her share of the national gift for the founding of 
an agricultural college, was swallowed up by some financial sharks in New York; it 
amounted to more than $80,000. The establishment of such a college would 
have been of great value to the State, giving an impetus to effort in exactly the 
necessary direction. 

The educational affairs of each county are managed by a " board of public 
instruction," consisting of five men recommended by the representatives of 
the Legislature, and appointed by the State Superintendent. There are about 
700,000 acres of " school-lands " in the State, and there are some funds which 
are used in aiding counties to start schools. There are about 63,000 pupil- 
children in the State, not more than one-fourth of whom are supplied with 
good facilities for instruction. The amount annually expended for free education 
by the State, including donations from the Peabody fund, is $100,000. It 
was claimed that in 1873, 18,000 children attended the schools. At Gaines- 
ville, Key West, Tallahassee, Pensacola, and Madison, there are successful 
schools for both colored and white children, and at Ocala, Ouincy, and Appa- 
lachicola, there are colored free schools, liberally aided by. the Peabody bequest. 

In the backwoods there is an alarming amount of ignorance among the 
adults ; there are hundreds of men and women who have not the simplest rudi- 
ments of education, and many amusing stories are told of the simplicity and boor- 
ishness of the "crackers." They are a soft-voiced, easy-going, childlike kind of 



THE "CRACKERS" THE PRESENT CONSTITUTION. 



421 



folk, quick to anger, vindictive when their rage is protracted and becomes a 
feud ; and generous and noble in their rough hospitality. But they live the 
most undesirable of lives, and, surrounded by every facility for a luxurious 
existence, subsist on " hog and hominy," and drink the meanest whiskey. 

The Florida Constitution, adopted under reconstruction, contains some novel 
features. One clause provides that the Legislature shall enact laws requiring edu- 
cational qualifications for electors after the year 1880, but that no such law shall 
be made applicable to any elector who may have registered and voted at any 
election previous to that time. The Governor is elected for four years. The 
blacks predominate in the tiny Senate and Assembly, composed of twenty-four 
and fifty-three members, respectively ; and during the sessions, Tallahassee, the 
capital, situated in a rolling country, in the midst of a beautiful spring region, 
is the scene of tyro legislation such as at present distinguishes the capitals of 
Louisiana and South Carolina. 

Quincy, St. Mark's, and Monticello, all offer attractions to the traveler; 
the latter is the site of a sanguinary fight between the forces under General 
Jackson and the Miccosakie Indians, and there, too, De Soto is said to have 
encamped on his way to the northward. 




A Country Cart. 



XLVTI. 

SOUTH CAROLINA — PORT ROYAL — THE SEA ISLANDS. 

THE REVOLUTION. 

PORT ROYAL, in South Carolina, was once first cousin to Plymouth Rock, 
in Massachusetts. The rugged New England headland was the refuge 
and the fortress of the English Puritan; the fertile plain at the mouth of the 
broad and noble Carolinian river was the resort of the French Huguenot, 
who preferred exile and danger to the sacrifice of his faith. Jean Ribault and 
his hardy men-at-arms, sailing northward from the blooming banks of Florida, 
in 1562, anchored their ships during a great storm at the mouth of a "fair 
and large harbor," and named it, and the river emptying into it, Port 
Royal. 

The good Frenchmen who had been sent by brave old Admiral Col- 
igny to found an asylum for the oppressed in the New World, wandered 
delightedly along the shores of, the stream, under moss-grown oaks and lofty 
pines, beneath the cedars and the palmettoes, and shaped visions of future 
glory. They pictured to themselves the time when the waters of the vast 
harbor should be covered with noble fleets ; when spacious gardens should 
dot the luxuriant shores ; and, after a few days of repose, they raised a stately 
pillar of stone, with the arms of France graven on it, and in honor of Charles IX., 
built a fort on an island in the river. A little garrison was placed in charge, 
and Ribault returned to France, to recount with enthusiasm the wonders of that 
part of the then province of Florida, destined in future to be named, as the 
Frenchman called his fort, Carolina. 

To-day, more than three centuries after Ribault's adventurous voyage, the 
site of the old fort and pillar is not even definitely known. Port Royal is an 
infant town just springing into commercial activity, under the influence of 
slowly reviving commerce ; and the negro slouchingly tills the soil and lounges 
in the sun on the shores from which the tide of revolution has swept his late 
master. 

In the sixteenth century, the country claimed in America by the Spaniards 
as Florida, and by the French as " New France," was supposed to extend from 
the Chesapeake to the "Tortugas," along the coast, and inland as far as the 
exploring foreigners might choose to penetrate. During many perilous years the 
States now known as Florida and South Carolina had a common history. The 
Huguenots continued their explorations until the treachery and murderous fury 
of the Spaniards had exterminated all of them who ventured into the Florida 
lands; and had Menendez of Avila, the blackest villain whose life-record blots 



THE HUGUENOTS AT PORT ROYAL. 423 

the annals of American discovery, died in his cradle, South Carolina would, 
perhaps, at this day have been peopled by Protestant Gauls. 

The little settlement at Port Royal suffered many ills. The soldiers left by 
Ribault, borne down by misfortune and sickness, determined to return home. 
The Indians aided the soldiers to construct a brigantine, with which the miserable 
men tried to make their way to France ; but they were reduced to starvation on 
the voyage, and it was only after they had begun to eat each other, that the 
survivors were rescued by an English vessel. 

The settlement founded by Ribault was thus abandoned ; and two years elapsed 
before another Huguenot expedition, led by Laudonniere, founded a settlement 
near the mouth of the river May, as the St. John's, prince of the streams of 
Florida, was then called. Had Laudonniere prospered, the Port Royal fort might 
have been rebuilt ; but the Spaniards from St. Augustine, who fell upon both 
Laudonniere and the re-enforcements which Ribault had brought him, rendered 
the second of Coligny's attempts disastrous. Even the colossal vengeance which 
that preux chevalier, Dominique de Gourgues, took upon the Spaniards in Florida, 
two years afterward, did not establish French influence there ; and no Huguenot 
came again to our Southern shores until one hundred and thirty years later, 
when the revocation of the edict of Nantes in France sent hundreds of the 
descendants of Coligny's followers to South Carolina. Their illustrious names 
are still borne by many worthy families in Charleston. 

Under the "Palatinate" the development of the province now known as 
South Carolina was begun. Under a charter from the crown, after the Restora- 
tion, all the lands lying between the 31st and the 36th degrees of north latitude 
were granted to a proprietary government. 

The utmost religious liberty prevailed in the newly-organized province. The 
Constitution, under which the noble dukes and earls who had received the charter 
proposed that their colonists should live, was framed by the philosopher, John 
Locke. The eldest of the " lords proprietors " was Palatine , the seven other 
chief officers were Admiral, Chamberlain, Chancellor, Constable, Chief Justice, 
High Steward and Treasurer. The province was subdivided into counties, 
signories, baronies, precincts and colonies. Each signory, barony and colony 
consisted of 12,000 acres, and it was provided that after a certain term of years 
the "proprietors" should not have power to alienate or make over their proprie- 
torship, but that "it should descend unto their heirs male." Here was a good 
foundation for a landed aristocracy. Every freeman of Carolina was authorized 
to "have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves;" and no person 
could hold or claim any land in the province except from and under the "lords 
proprietors." 

The first attempt of the English experimenters to settle the country was at 
Port Royal, in 1670. William Sayle was appointed Governor of the colony, and 
great inducements were offered to English immigrants. The first site of 
" Charlestown " was on the western bank of the Ashley river, and the estate 
where that site was is still known as "Old Town." Subsequently the settle- 
ment was removed to the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers. 



424 THE FOUNDING OF CHARLESTON THE CAROLINIANS OF OLD. 

It was not until 1783 that the town was incorporated. The original expedi- 
tion of the proprietary government cost ;£ 12,000, and in the years between 1670 
and 1682, 100 houses were built at " Charlestown," and an ancient chronicler 
adds that many who went there as servants had become worth several hundreds 
of pounds, with their estates still increasing. 

The Constitution which Locke had framed, after the pattern of Plato's model 
Republic, was sufficient for the Carolinians only until 1693, and in 17 19 Carolina 
put itself under the protection of King George. 

As a colony, a rapid development and a large prosperity were experienced at 
once, and the people began to turn their attention to their superb material 
resources with a vigor never before manifested. 

One century after the granting of the charter by Charles the Second to the 
proprietors, Carolina had arisen to considerable commercial eminence. " Charles- 
town," Beaufort, Purysburg, Jacksonborough, Dorchester, Camden and George- 
town were the principal settlements, but no one, save the first, consisted of more 
than thirty or forty dwellings. The negroes already outnumbered the whites. 
In Charleston they were as eight to five ; and while the white population of the 
colony did not exceed 40,000, the negroes numbered 80,000 or 90,000. 

At that time it was said of the whites that, " in the progress of society they 
had not advanced beyond that period in which men were distinguished more by 
their external than internal accomplishments." They were chiefly known in 
England "by the number of their slaves, the value of their annual produce, or 
the extent of their landed estates." They were lively and gay ; "all novelties in 
fashion, ornament and dress were quickly introduced, and even the spirit of 
luxury and extravagance, too common in England," was beginning to creep 
among them. It was said that " there were more people possessed of five and 
ten thousand pounds sterling in the province " than were to be found anywhere 
else among the same number of persons. "Their rural life and their constant 
use of arms" kept up a martial spirit among them. The Indians hated the 
negroes, and there was, consequently, no danger of their conspiring together. 
The Carolina merchant was an honest, industrious, and generous man. 

The province readily obtained all the credit it demanded ; the staples which it 
produced were very valuable, and agriculture and trade were constantly enlarged 
in their scope by the importations of ship-loads of negroes. A little before the 
time of the American revolution, the exports from " Carolina " in a single year 
amounted to ,£756,000 sterling ; but the imports were so extensive that the 
colony remained indebted to the mother country. 

Still the old English critics thought the Carolinians rather slovenly husband- 
men, and were astonished at the manner in which they managed their estates. 
Freeholds of land were easily obtained by patent or purchase, and were also 
alienable at will ; so that the system of husbandry was not carried on according 
to any established principles or plans. The planter ordinarily cleared a wooded 
tract, planted it with rice or indigo until it was exhausted, and then neglected it 
for a fresh location. Nowhere was the soil improved, nowhere were grass seeds 
sown for enriching the pastures, and the only study was the putting of the 



PORT ROYAL ISLAND AND BEAUFORT. 425 

largest crop into market. Safe and prosperous, guaranteed royal protection, 
possessing unlimited credit and indulgence, and owning the labor necessary to 
produce wealth, the Carolinian of one hundred years ago seemed a most fortu- 
nate mortal, and his carelessness was accounted a princely quality. 

Port Royal Island and its chief town, Beaufort, are monuments to the dis- 
astrous effects of the revolution which has swept over South Carolina within the 
last generation. Everywhere on the chain of beautiful sea islands along the low 
coast one finds the marks of the overturn. But Port Royal, situated On the 
river terminating in what is perhaps the grandest harbor on the American coast, 
has hopes, and may bring new life to decaying Beaufort. 

A railroad has penetrated the low lands, creeping across marshes and 
estuaries upon formidable trestles, and now drains the rich cotton-fields around 
Augusta, in Georgia, toward the Broad river. The town is laid out into lots, 
and the numbers of the avenues run ambitiously high already ; an English 
steamship line has sent its pioneer vessel to the port ; and the Home Government 
talks of establishing a navy-yard upon the stream. 

With commercial facilities which neither New Orleans, Savannah, nor 
Norfolk can boast, Port Royal deserves a great future. The harbor which 
Ribault 300 years ago enthusiastically described as so large that " all the argo- 
sies of Venice might safely ride therein," is certainly ample for the accommo- 
dation of the largest fleets known, and is easy and safe of access. 

The lowland scenery of South Carolina is as varied as tropical. From the 
sea the marshes, or savannahs, stretching seventy miles back from the coast, 
seem perfectly level ; but there are in many places bluffs and eminences crowned 
with delicate foliage. A vast panorama of fat meadows, watered by creeks ; of 
salt and fresh marshes; of swamp lands of inexhaustible fertility, from which 
spring the sugar-cane and cypress ; of the rich, firm soil, where the oak and the 
hickory stand in solid columns, and of barrens studded with thousands of young 
pines — salutes the eye. 

The innumerable branches which penetrate the low-lying lands from the sea 
have formed a kind of checker- work of island and estuary. The forests along 
the banks of the streams, and scattered on the hedges between the marshes, are 
beautiful. The laurel, the bay, the palmetto, the beech, the dog-wood, the 
cherry, are overgrown with wanton, luxuriant vines, which straggle across the 
aisles where the deer and the fox still wander. 

In the spring the jessamine and the cherry fill the air with the perfume of 
their blossoms ; in winter the noble oaks, in their garments of moss, and the 
serried pines, preserve the verdure which the other trees have lost, and give 
to the landscape an aspect of warmth and life. When the rice plantations are 
submerged, and the green plants are just showing their heads above the water, 
and nodding and swaying beneath the slight breeze passing over the hundreds 
of acres, the effect is indescribably novel and beautiful. 

Beaufort, in a soft, delicious climate, where the orange flourishes, is beautifully 
located, and was once the abode of hundreds of proud and wealthy planters. 
One reaches it by rail from Yemassee, a little junction in the midst of a pine 



426 FROM YEMASSEE TO BEAUFORT. 

forest, where the trains from Charleston, Savannah, Augusta, and Port Royal all 
meet at midday, and indulge in delays which in the North would be thought 
disastrous, but which seem quite natural in the slumbrous climate of the 
lowlands. 

The journey from Yemassee is through rich woods, and along high ridges ; 
past newly cleared lands, where the freedmen are grubbing for existence ; past 
old and worn-out plantations, now deserted, with no smoke curling upward from 
the chimneys of the long rows of negro cabins, and no signs of life about the 
huge, white mansion in the clump of oaks, or in the centre of a once lovely 
garden. At the little station one sees smartly dressed men mounting fine 
horses, and galloping down the long, straight avenues in the forests, to the plan- 
tations which they own many miles away. One also sees colored people every- 
where, of every shade and variety, lounging, riding, talking in high-pitched 
voices, and with an accent which renders their speech unintelligible to the 
stranger. 

Sometimes a startled doe, followed by her fawns, bounds across the track. 
There are but few houses to be seen, and they are miles away. You catch a 
glimpse of some mighty lagoon, lonely and grand; now you are whirled into the 
lonely forests — along a river bank — across a wide arm of the sea ; now through 
swamps in which innumerable cypress-knees and rotting boughs seem like snakes 
and monsters in the stagnant water, and now where you note the gleam of the 
sun on the white walls of some deserted Beaufort mansion. 

The long street by the water- side, in Beaufort, was as still when I entered it 
as if the town were asleep. The only sign of life was a negro policeman, dressed 
in a shiny blue uniform, pacing languidly up and down. But there was not even 
a dog to arrest. On the pretty pier in front of the Sea Island Hotel two or three 
buzzards were ensconced asleep ; half way across the stream a dredge-boat was 
hauling up phosphates from the channel-bed. 

I wandered through the town. It was evidently once very beautiful, and even 
now there are many remains of the ancient beauty. But a silence as of the 
grave reigned everywhere. Many of the mansions were closed and fallen into 
decay. The old Episcopal church, surrounded by a high moss-grown wall, 
seemed indignantly to have shut itself in from the encroachments of the 
revolution. The whole aspect of the place was that which I afterward found 
pervading other South Carolinian towns — that of complete prostration, dejection, 
stagnation. 

Here the revolution penetrated to the quick. The planter, when he returned 
from his enforced exile during the war, found that the negro had installed him- 
self upon his lands, and would not give them up. A practical confiscation had 
been operated. There was no redress; the government was in the hands of the 
negroes. It is true that they were the majority, as they had been for many 
years before they received their civil rights. The victory of the Union armies 
meant land to these negroes. They had some idea of vengeance ; they did not 
care to respect property, and hundreds of white families were left homeless, 
moneyless, and driven into cities where they were friendless. The great planta- 



THE ACTS OF FORFEITURE NEGRO GOVERNMENT. 427 

tions of sea-island cotton were left untilled; the negro was too busy with politics 
to work ; and the General Government was in no mood for listening to individual 
complaints. The "acts of forfeiture," passed in 1862, swept all the lands in St. 
Helena parish and thousands of acres on Port Royal Island into the hands of the 
United States Government, by whose authority they were in turn sold on long 
time to the negroes, and liens taken as security. The original owners who dared 
to return, protested,* but it was of no avail. The lands have been taken from 
them, and the negro rules over both them and their lands. He and his fellows 
dispose not only of the revenues of Beaufort, but of the State. The idle and 
vicious of his race huddle together in gorgeous parlors, once decorated with ele- 
gant furniture, purchased by the planters with the proceeds of slave labor. 

The City Hall is controlled by the blacks, and the magistrates, the police, and 
the representatives in the Legislature, are nearly all Africans. In Beaufort town- 
ship there are ten negroes to one white person ; and in all towns in the adjacent 
country it is a similar story. At Hilton Head there are about 3,000 colored 
persons and hardly 100 whites. On St. Helena's Island, still in the same county, 
there are 6,000 negroes and about 70 whites; in Yemassee, nearly 3,000 blacks 
and barely 200 whites. In the adjoining counties, Colleton and Charleston, 
the proportions in the towns are about the same, except in Charleston city. 
On Edisto Island there are nearly 3,000 negroes, and hardly any white 
persons. 

The blacks have formed communities by themselves. They have left the 
country and gone to town. The result is that in the chief centres of every 
township they are immensely in the majority. They monopolize everything. 
Naturally enough, they are in possession of a great deal which they cannot use. 
They seem, especially on Port Royal Island, contented with a small tract of land 
on which to raise cotton, and over which their hogs may wander. Some are very 
industrious ; others never do any work ; the masses are satisfied with getting a 
living. They know little about markets, surplus crops, and the accumulation 
of riches, and care less. They love hunting and fishing ; they revel in the idle- 
ness which they never knew until after the war. But they are cumberers of the 
soil ; their ignorance impedes, their obstinacy throttles. They are tools in the 
hands of the corrupt. They lack moral sense, as might have been expected, 
after a few generations of slavery. They are immoral and irresponsible; emo- 
tional and unreliable ; not at all unfriendly in spirit toward the whites, their 
old masters, yet by their attitude in reality doing them deadly harm. 

* The act of 1862 provided that if a property owner should fail to pay, within sixty days, the 
amount assessed by the Land Commissioners for South Carolina, appointed by the General 
Government, "the title to his land should thereupon become forfeited to the United States;" 
and that after such forfeiture a sale should follow, by which the title should be vested in the 
purchaser or in the United States. This act was, of course, based upon the assumption that the 
States in which it was operative were out of the Union. Inasmuch as the Land Commissioners 
for South Carolina did not enter upon their duties until one year after the establishment at Beau- 
fort of the military and civil authority of the Federal Government, a large number of those 
Carolinians who have suffered by confiscation claim that the whole sale of the lands is illegal, and 
that the titles of the present owners are equivocal and false. 



428 THE EFFECTS OF THE REVOLUTION. 

The undoing of the old relations between the two races, and the conferring of 
political privileges upon him who was formerly the inferior, have been the ruin 
of certain sections of these fertile lowlands. Neither race seems likely to 
resume operations on anything like the old scale of grandeur. The sea-island 
cotton crop, once a source of such wealth, is small now, yet the negroes, with 
industry, might raise immense crops. In 1870, Beaufort county, with 150,000 
acres of improved land, sent to market but a little over 7,000 bales ; it has 
done somewhat better of late. The culture has met with some disasters ; 
caterpillars and foul weather have interfered. The negroes usually plant a 
little sea-island cotton, no matter how small may be their farms. 

The Northern capitalists who have undertaken this difficult but once very 
profitable culture, have, as a rule, sunk the better portion of their invested capi- 
tal ; and the native planters have gradually taken to planting a less number of 
acres yearly. During the three years preceding the war, South Carolina sent to 
market 54,904 bales of sea-island cotton ; but in the three years ending Septem- 
ber 1st, 1873, only 23,307 bales were sent out. The control of prices abroad has 
also been lost to the sea-island planter in South Carolina, as, in the days of 
slavery, he carelessly sold the finer seeds to any one from other countries who 
wished to buy, and now encounters formidable foreign rivalry in Egypt, the 
Sandwich Islands, and in South America, as well as in our own Gulf States. 

If a planter of the days when the royal colony of South Carolina was in the 
height of its glory could return now, and wander through the streets of moss- 
grown Beaufort, he would be amazed, but no more so than would the planter of 
1850 or i860, if he too might return. 

For it would be found that in a decade and a-half one of the most remarkable 
revolutions ever recorded in history has occurred. A wealthy and highly pros- 
perous community has been reduced to beggary ; its vassals have become its 
lords, and dispose of the present and pledge the future resources of the State. In 
ten years the total valuation of the commonwealth has been reduced from nearly 
$500,000,000 to barely $150,000,000 at the present time; the banking capital of 
Charleston from $13,000,000 to $3,000,000; the insurance capital is entirely 
destroyed. The taxes have been increased from $392,000 in i860, to $2,000,000 
in 1870; slaves valued at $174,000,000 have been freed, and set to learn the 
arts of self-government and civilization. More than 400,000 blacks now inhabit 
the State, and their number is constantly increasing. Thousands of planters have 
been so utterly ruined that they can never hope even to attain comfortable 
circumstances again. 

Opposite an elegant mansion, on one of the main streets of Beaufort, is a 
small, unambitious structure, in which the former occupant of the grand man- 
sion is selling goods at retail. He returned after the capture of the town to find 
himself stripped of everything, and has been living in view of his former splendor 
ever since. His fields are held by strangers ; his house is converted into offices. 
In a day, as it were, he and thousands of others were reduced to complete 
dependence, and compelled to live under the government of the ignorant slaves 
whose labor they had grown rich upon. 



XLVIIL 

ON A RICE PLANTATION IN SOUTH CAROLINA. 

THE lowlands of South Carolina are the most interesting portion of the 
State, in a commercial and picturesque point of view, and there the 
political outlook is also most depressing. The masses of the freedmen and 
women on the sea islands and in the sea-board counties are very ignorant, and 
vastly inferior, in natural intelligence and ability, to the negro of the upper and 
middle sections of the same State, or the type met with throughout Virginia, 
Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky. 

The lowland negro of South Carolina has a barbaric dialect, which no external 
influences have as yet impressed in the slightest degree ; the English words seem 
to tumble all at once from his mouth, and to get sadly mixed whenever he 
endeavors to speak. The phraseology is usually so odd, too, that even after the 




View of a Rice-field in South Carolina. [Page 434.] 

stranger has become a little accustomed to the thick tones of the voice and the 
awkward enunciation, he cannot readily understand. Certainly a Virginian 
negro from the town could not comprehend these low-country people at all, 
until his ear had become habituated to the apparent mumbling. 

The children of the planters, brought up on the plantations, and allowed to 

run in the woods with the little negroes, acquired the same dialect ; and to-day 

many a gentleman's son regrets that it is apparent in his speech. These negroes 

also have their peculiar religious superstitions and ceremonies. I repeatedly 

28 



43° THE LOWLAND NEGROES IN SOUTH CAROLINA. 

asked planters in Beaufort and Colleton counties if the negroes there had 
changed much in manners and habits since their slave days, and the invariable 
answer was, " No ! " They have learned to understand that the vote gives 
power; they find work in large bands together on the rice plantations distaste- 
ful to them, and they are perfectly happy when they succeed in obtaining 
an acre or two of land, and in erecting a cabin. To own a mule is the acme 
of bliss. 

The men and women still maintain their old-time servility toward their former 
masters. When they meet them on the roads the men always touch their hats, 
and the women, no matter how huge the basket they may happen to be carrying 
upon their heads, courtesy profoundly. The word " mas'r " is still used, being 
so -intimately associated in the negro's mind with certain individuals, that he has 
no inclination to drop it. 

Friendliest exterior relations are maintained between ex-master and ex-slave, 
as a rule ; and the white Conservatives sometimes bitterly regret that they did 
not come boldly forward, at the outset of reconstruction, and themselves guide 
the negro votes. There would, at one time, have been a fair chance for such a 
fusion ; but the races soon drifted into a separate political current, and the 
negro appeared in his present role of corrupt and ignorant legislator. At present, 
the whites cannot get a fair hearing, and are subject to many tyrannies at the 
hands of negro justices and constables. 

There are honorable exceptions to all the general criticisms which may be 
made upon the character of the lowland negro ; but, as a mass, the race is really 
very degraded. It is making gradual progress toward a condition of independ- 
ence ; yet ignorance and irresponsibility are still the rule. The marriage 
relation is almost unknown in many of the lowland counties ; men and women 
live together as long as they can agree, and are called husband and wife. 

Passing through a rice-field one morning, in which there were, perhaps, four 
hundred black men and women at work, I requested the owner of the plantation, 
whom I accompanied, to ask four men, who were sitting by a rice stack awaiting 
a barge, some leading question calculated to throw light on their morality. Each 
of the four had had two "wives," as they termed it; one of the oldest had 
had four. The causes of separation were various — infidelity, abuse, a hasty 
word, or laziness. The children who were the fruit of these careless unions 
were kept by either father or mother, as the couple might agree. 

Jealousy is a terrible passion among these people, and sometimes leads to 
capital crime. All, without exception, are religious; they find a temporary relief 
and an excitement in the " meetings," and will go to one, no matter how distant 
it may be. Most of the men are armed; they manage to secure a pistol or a gun, 
and are as fond of hunting as their white employers. The situation of those 
gentlemen who had been slave-holders and large planters before the war, was 
dreadful for a year or two after the fall of the Confederacy. The freedmen were 
difficult to manage, could not be got to work, and were jealous of anything which 
seemed like an attempt to get them back to their old places. The intervention 
of soldiery was constantly necessary to keep the peace. 






TROUBLES OF PLANTER AND LABORER. 



431 



The low-country planter lived in a luxurious but careless way. Although 
some few were ignorant, and cherished the belief that there was nothing else 
in the country so fine as their forests and swamps, most of them were court- 
eous, unaffected, and devoid of pretension. They resided with their families at 
their country-seats on the plantations, during the winter months, and in the 
summer removed to pleasant mansions along the Ashley river or on Sullivan's 
Island, near Charleston. The Hey wards, the Manigaults, the Lowndes, the Mid- 
dletons, the Hugers, the Barnwells, the Elliotts, the Rhetts, went annually to 
Charleston, where there was choice and polished society. 

To-day, the majority of those engaged in planting at the outbreak of the war, 
are pitiably poor; and just at the close of the war, the spectacle of men who had 
owned two hundred or five hundred slaves, reduced to driving a cart or tending 
a grocery, was quite common. The enforced poverty of many is even bitterer 







Negro Cabins on a Rice Plantation. 



now than it was then, for they are compelled to see, day by day, the poof ' 
State, which has already been so impoverished, plundered anew and embar- 
rassed further by the action of the ignorant and vicious legislators. 

Many of the lowland negroes were firmly impressed, when first called to use 
the ballot, that they were to gain property by it, and great numbers of them still 
have an idea that they have been defrauded of what they were entitled to. They 
have also been told by so many legislators of their own race, that all the property 
once their masters' now properly belongs to them, that they literally believe it, 
in many cases, while, in others, they consider the whole thing a muddle entirely 
beyond their comprehension. 

This assertion that the negroes ought to take the planters' lands has been 
often made by white politicians who gained control of the negro at the time that 



432 



THE THEORY OF TAXATION IN SOUTH CAROLINA. 



the white natives refused to. take active part in the elections, or the reorganization 
of the State. The whole theory of taxation in the commonwealth, as evolved by 
Nash and the few other colored men of talent in the Legislature, is summed up in 
these words, from the present Governor's last message : " The taxes fall chiefly 
where they belong — upon real estate. The owner cannot afford to keep 
thousands of acres idle and unproductive, merely to gratify his personal vanity, 
and because he inherited them from his father. Stern necessity, therefore, will 
compel him to cut up his ancestral possessions into small farms, and sell them to 
those who can and will make them productive ; and thus the masses of the people 
will become property holders." 

Swart Demos in the legislative chair, with artful rogues around him, remem- 
bers only that the tax was not raised from land, but upon the slaves, previous to 
i860; and when he thinks of it, very likely his blood is hot, and he willingly 
applies a slashing tax to the land owners. "In the old days," he says, "your 
cotton acres, worth hundreds Of dollars, were only taxed four cents an acre, but 
on 400,000 wretches, such as I, you placed a tax of sixty cents per head, and 
made us work it out, thus getting nearly half a million of revenue. Now we will 
make you work out your tax, and we will wrest your lands away from you." 
And so bitterness is needlessly provoked on both sides, and oppression 
flourishes. It is not taxation, nor even an increase of taxation, that the Avhite 
people of South Carolina object to ; 
but it is taxation without repre- 
sentation, and unjust, tyrannical, 
arbitrary, overwhelming taxation, 
producing revenues which never 
get any further than the already 
bursting pockets of knaves and 
dupes ! 

Rice culture has been the 
prominent industry of South Caro- 
lina since the time of the Landgrave 
Thomas Smith, under the proprie- 
tary government. With the deter- 
mination of the planters to make it 
the chief object of their care, came 
the necessity for importing great 
numbers of slaves, and the sacrifice 
of many hundreds of lives, in the 
arduous labors of clearing the 
ground and preparing the soil. 
The cypress forests gave place to 

green, and the rivers were diverted from their channels 
to flood the vast expanse in which the negroes had set the seeds. 

In 1724, 439 African slaves were imported to South Carolina, together with a 
vast amount of other commodities, in exchange for which the citizens gave 18,000 





"The women were dressed in 
gay colors." [Page 435.] 

the fields of waving- 



With forty or fifty pounds of 
rice stalks on their heads." 
[Page 435- ] 



OUTGROWTH OF CAROLINIAN RICE CULTURE. 433 

barrels of rice and 52,000 barrels of naval stores. Year by year the importations 
of negroes increased in numbers ; year by year the planter became " more eager 
in the pursuit of large possessions of land," and " strenuously vied with his neigh- 
bor," says a chronicler, "for a superiority of fortune." 

The Carolinians were compelled to keep up fortifications on the borders of the 
Spanish domains, to prevent the negroes from escaping into foreign territory ; but 
they had few other external cares. Their trade grew constantly with New Eng- 
land, New York and Pennsylvania; and in 1738, when there were fully 40,000 
negroes in South Carolina, Spanish policy provoked a formidable insurrection on 
the part of the blacks. This brought on open hostilities between Spaniards and 
Carolinians, and the latter made an unsuccessful expedition against St. Augustine. 

It should be borne in mind that the following statistics, showing how rapidly 
the exportation of rice increased in quantity, also shows how swiftly the slave 
population of the province grew. From 1720 to 1729, the export was 44,081 
tons; from 1730 to 1740, it was 99,905 tons; and in the single year of 1740, 
90,000 barrels were sent away, the gain upon which was estimated at .£220,000. 
In 1 77 1, the exports of the State amounted to £756,000 sterling. Shipping 
crowded the harbors ; money was plenty ; the planters commanded the best of 
everything from Great Britain and the West India Islands. There were at that 
period no taxes whatever upon real or personal estate ; but the revenues were 
raised by duties on ¥. spirituous liquors, sugar, molasses, flour, biscuit, negro 
slaves," etc., and amounted to several thousand pounds per annum. 

And so, for many generations, the rice culture and the slave system went 
hand in hand upon the fertile Carolina lowlands. Good authorities have assured 
me that they believe there were 1, 000,000 acres of rice-lands in cultivation in 
South Carolina at the outbreak of the civil war. At the present time there is 
hardly one-fourth of that area cultivated, but there is a steady increase. 

The blows struck by immediate emancipation upon this once gigantic industry 
were crushing. Under the slave regime, the planters successfully competed with 
other producers in all the markets of the world. From 1850 to i860, they 
exported 705,317,600 pounds of rice, valued at $24,619,009. The total produc- 
tion of rice in the United States in 1850 was 215,313,497 pounds; even in i860, 
it was 187,162,032. Such figures are eloquent. The rice-producing States 
suffered severely at an early period of the war ; the fields were abandoned ; and 
in South Carolina the production has decreased from 119,100,524 pounds, in 
i860, to 32,304,825, in 1870. The annual product in Georgia, Louisiana and 
the Carolinas, from 1865 to 1871, will show that the industry is gradually 
struggling to its feet once more : 

Year. Pounds. j Year. Pounds. 

1866 12,002,080 1869 . , 48,837,920 

1867 19,368,060 1870 54,117,320 

1868 27,566,740 187I 59,000,000 

Some of the rice plantations cover thousands of acres even now ; and the 
employment of from five to eight hundred men, women and children by a single 



434 



A RICE PLANTATION IN COLLETON COUNTY. 




A Pair of Mule- Boots. 
[Page 435.] 



person, is not at all uncommon. I visited the celebrated plantation at Green 
Pond, in Colleton county, the property of Mr. Bissell, who has 3,500 acres under 
his control. He, in common with others, was broken by 
the war, and is struggling with the hundred ills which 
beset the planter in the changed condition of affairs. 

Mr. Bissell's broad fields lie seven miles from the 
Charleston and Savannah railroad, at the rear of extensive 
pine forests, in which, now that the white man is so poorly 
represented in the Legislature, the poacher wanders un- 
reproved. The plantation extends across the Combahee 
river into Beaufort county, and at various points rice- 
pounding mills and little villages, in which the workers live, are established. 
A morning ride in the soft, Italian-like autumn across this or similar planta- 
tions, is a delicious experience. Mounted on a stout mule or on a Kentucky 
horse, you gallop through the perfumed avenues of the forests until you reach 
the wide expanse of fields, cut into squares by long trenches, through which 
water from the river in the background is admitted to every part of the land. 

The breeze rustles musically in the tall cane along the banks, in whose sedgy 
recesses the alligator and the serpent hide. In the distance an antlered deer 
may break from his cover, and after one defiant glance, stamp his foot, and- be 
gone ! A white sail glides on the horizon's rim, as the little schooner from 
Charleston works her way around to the mill, where long processions of black boys 
and girls, with baskets on their heads, and their mouths 
filled with horrible jargon, are waiting to load the rice. 

The injury done to all the plantations in these low- 
land counties, by the neglect consequent on the war, is 
incalculable. Most of these plantations have been re- 
claimed from the waters ; have been diked, ditched, 
furnished with "trunks," by means of which the planter 
can inundate or drain his land at will.* A rice plantation 
is, in fact, a huge hydraulic machine, maintained by con- 
stant warring against the rivers. The utmost attention and 
vigilance is necessary, and the labor must be ready at a 
moment's notice for the most exhaustive efforts. Alter- 
nate flooding and draining must take place several times 
during the season, and one part of the crop must be 
flooded, while the other adjacent to it is dry. 

Fields are divided into sections, and trunks or canals 

convey water from the river to each separately. " The 

whole apparatus of levels, flood-gates, trunks, canals, 

banks, ditches," says a prominent planter, " is of the most 

extensive kind, requiring skill and unity of purpose." The slightest leak in the 

banks or dikes may end in the ruin of the ,whole plantation. Freshets, too, 

commit frightful havoc from time to time. At one fell swoop the produce of a 

* Speech of Hon. F. A. Sawyer, of South Carolina, in the U. S. Senate, in 1872. 




NEGROES ON THE RICE PLANTATION. 



435 



thousand acres on Mr. Bissell's plantation was swept away in 1872. The cost 
of reclaiming rice-lands, and fitting them for culture, was about $100 per acre 
before the war, and so greatly had they been damaged by long neglect that 
more than half that sum has been expended in their rehabilitation. Once well 
prepared, the annual cost of cultivation is now about thirty dollars as com- 
pared with ten dollars in former days ; but it is steadily decreasing. 

We wandered over perhaps 700 acres, in Colleton and Beaufort counties. 
The men and women at work in the different sections were under the control of 
field- masters. The spectacle was lively. The women were dressed in gay 
colors, with handkerchiefs uniting all the colors of the rainbow, around their 
temples. Their feet were bare, and their stout limbs encased in uncouth flannel 
wrappings. Most of them, while staggering out through the marshes with forty 
or fifty pounds of rice stalks on their heads, kept up an incessant jargon with 
one another, and indulged in a running fire of invective against the field-master. 




The "trunk-minders," the watchmen on whose vigilance the plantation's 
safety depends, promenaded briskly ; the fiat-boats, on which the field hands 
deposited their huge bundles of rice stalks, were poled up to the mill, where the 
grain was threshed and separated from the straw, winnowed, and carried in 
baskets to the schooners which transported it to Charleston, and the " pounding- 
mills." During harvest-time 800 hands are employed on this plantation. 

Harvest is hardly completed by March, when the sowing begins again. The 
trunks are opened in each section the day it is planted, and the fields are flooded. 
The mules, that annually drag the ploughs through the marshes, are booted with 
leather contrivances, to prevent them from sinking into the treacherous ooze. 
To the negroes is given the rice that grows along the margins, and consider- 
able profit is obtained from its sale. The fields in autumn are yellowish in 
hue, tinged here and there lightly with green, where young rice is upspringing 



436 



PHASES OF LOWLAND LIFE. 



from the shoots recently cut down. The rice lies in ricks, but is ill protected, 
swarms of birds carrying away great quantities. • 

While we were strolling afield, one stout negro came up and asked " Mas'r 
Ben" to buy him a mule with $100 which he had saved. " Mas'r Ben" agreed 
to do it, and informed me that such a purchase was a sign of a negro's assured 
prosperity. The wages paid the rice-field hands ranged from twenty-five cents 
to one dollar and seventy-five cents daily, but the manager on this, as on many 
other plantations, found great difficulty in keeping the labor organized and avail- 
able. The men found that by two or three days' work they could procure 
money enough to support them in idleness the next week, and sometimes the 
overseers were at a loss what to do for help. 

Beautiful were the broad and carefully cultivated acres, stretching miles away 
on either side of the placid, deep, and noble Combahee ; picturesque were the 
granaries, almost bursting with the accumulated stores of the precious grain ; 
and novel and inspiring the vistas of the long sedge-bordered canals, through 
which the morning breezes lightly whistled. The sea-myrtle was neighbor to 
the cane, and the tall grasses twined lovingly around them both. 

At the " store," about whose entrance were grouped packs of hounds, leap- 
ing and fawning about their masters, who were mounting their horses, we saw 
crowds of negresses, barefooted and barelimbed, bringing poultry or eggs to 
exchange for corn, or chattering frantically, or bursting into boisterous laughter 
which echoed over many a broad acre. 

One could not help thinking that in due time a vast amount of labor-saving 
machinery must come to take the place of this rude and careless negro element 
upon the rice plantation. At present, the planters admit, there is an enor- 
mous waste, and the climate's character renders it impossible to introduce white 
labor and intelligence into the section. The negro men and women whom I 
saw were certainly of a low and degraded type, distinctively, — as a Frenchman, 

with his quick instincts, said on seeing a group of 
these same lowland people, — "a broken down 
r~, race !" 

At the threshing -mill, at the winnowing- ma- 
chine, among the great rice stacks where they were 
packing and sorting and unloading from barges> 
the women were coarse, brutish, and densely igno- 
rant; the men, in the main, the same. There 
were types of face in which the savage still stood 
out in splendor. Many women of sixty or seventy 
years of age were at work in various places about 
the field. They had evidently been untouched 
"At the winnowing- machine." ^y fo e spirit of the war. I doubt if they re- 

alized the change in their condition. Their conversation with me was confined 
to inquiries as to how much tobacco I would give them, and an appeal to me to 
tell Mas'r Ben that they "bin want" a new handkerchief, and hoped he would 
not forget them. The men as a rule were civil, but a little suspicious in 




THE LABOR QUESTION IN LOWLAND SOUTH CAROLINA. 



437 



demeanor, as if they did not intend to allow any advantage to be taken of 
them. If looked at sharply, they would wince, and finally, wreathing their lips 
with broad grins, would bow and shuffle away. 

The planters throughout this section, where the Middletons and the Hey- 
wards once tilled so many acres, and whence they drew great incomes, admit 
that the labor question is the most serious one with them. The profits of rice- 
planting are enormous, but the system of large plantations will, perhaps, have 
to be adhered to, and African* or Chinese labor can alone sustain the trials of the 
summer climate. The production of the State, and the adjacent lowlands in 
other States, will doubtless again reach the figure attained before the war, 
although the present condition of South Carolina would not seem to justify 
prophecies of any prosperity within her limits, save in Charleston. 




Aunt Bransom." — A venerable ex -slave on a South 
Carolina Rice Plantation. 



XLIX. 



CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. 



AND why prosperity in Charleston ? Mainly because the venerable city has 
established in addition to her important cotton trade, a large number 
of manufacturing enterprises, for which her location is particularly advantageous; 
and because her business men have an elastic spirit and a remarkable courage, 
which reflect the highest credit upon them. A veritable phcenix, always spring- 
ing triumphantly from the ashes of terrible conflagrations, as well as from the 
ruins caused by hurricanes and bombardments, the South Carolinian metropolis 
is, in itself, a standing reproof to the too oft-repeated assertion that the ancient 
commonwealth lacks enterprise. 

When the war closed there was not a completed railroad ending in Charles- 
ton. Those now known as the North-eastern, giving connection with the 




View from Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor. [Page 440.] 

route to Wilmington; the South Carolina, running north-westward to Columbia, 
Aiken, and Augusta; and the Savannah and Charleston, penetrating the lowlands 
and reaching to the Georgian seaport, were worn down and almost completely 
wrecked. Costly bridges'and trestles had been destroyed, depots burned, tracks 
torn up, and the amount of rolling-stock was absurdly inadequate to immediate 
wants. The rebuilding and equipment were begun in 1866. All the old rail 
connections are now resuscitated, and Charleston is reaching out for a wider 
range of commerce than, before the war, she would have deemed possible. The 
South Carolina railroad and its feeders, the Greenville and Columbia, and the 
Macon and Augusta, in Georgia, send vast quantities of freight, which heretofore 
went northward, to the Carolinian metropolis. The North-eastern, and the Savan- 



THE TRADE OF CHARLESTON. 439 

nah and Charleston, are important links in the shortest route from New York to 
Florida, and with the sea-board line, from New York to New Orleans. Many- 
steamship companies were compelled to suspend communication with the city 
during the war; now there are two steamer lines between New York and 
Charleston, comprising eight fine steamers, capable of carrying away 30,000 
bales of cotton monthly. On the Baltimore line there are three steamers, on 
the Philadelphia two, on the Boston two, with a carrying capacity altogether of 
about 14,000 bales monthly. The splendid line to Florida has been reopened, 
and the connections with Savannah, Beaufort, Georgetown, Edisto, and the 
Peedee river are also resumed, and are very prosperous. 

The increase in steamship freights from Charleston since i860 has been 300 
per cent., but the sail tonnage is not larger than it was in 1862, as much of its 
trade has been transferred to steamers. The following receipts of cotton at 
Charleston for eight years since the war also indicate a marked prosperity : 

Years.* Bales of Cotton. Years. Dales of Cotton. 

1865-66 111,714 1869-70 250,761 

1866-67 165,316 1870-7I 356,544 

1867-68 ; . . . 246,018 1871-72 252,686 

1868-69 200,764 1872-73 385,000 

A large proportion of this cotton was sent to Charleston for sale, not merely 
to pass through. The exports of rice from Charleston, from September, 1865, to 
September, 1873, amount to about 250,000 tierces. The increase in the number of 
naval stores reported has also been remarkable, as shown by the following table : 

Years. Barrels. Years. Barrels. 

1865-66 32,136 1869-70 : 79> I 56 

1866-67 54;° 2 6 1870-71 90,297 

1867-68 62,852 1871-72 151,553 

1868-69 72,279 1872-73 225,683 

The lumber exports since the war have also been large, footing up at least 
140,000,000 of feet. The rich pine forests of the State are annually of increasing 
importance. Charleston, Beaufort and Georgetown are all daily receiving great 
stores of lumber from the forests, which still stretch over thousands of acres. 
The swamps furnish the best of material for ship-building, and Charleston has 
built many fine lumber-mills in which to prepare the pine and other useful trees 
for shipping. The city sadly needs the addition of several millions to its banking 
capital to enable it to carry out its schemes. The three National and four State 
banks now have hardly $3,000,000 of paid up capital. There are four savings 
banks, with a little more than $1,000,000, much of which represents the savings 
of the freedmen, on deposit. Private bankers are also doing a good deal for the 
city's interests. 

Very lovely is the old city, lying confidingly on the waters, at the confluence 
of the broad Ashley and Cooper rivers, and fronting on the spacious harbor, over 
whose entrance the scarred and ever memorable Sumter keeps watch and ward. 
s The commercial year begins September 1. 



440 



CHARLESTON IN OLD TIMES — ITS APPROACHES. 



Nature has lavished a wealth of delicious foliage upon all the surroundings of the 
city, and the palmetto, the live and water oaks, the royal magnolias, the tall 
pines, the flourishing hedges, and the gardens filled with rich, tropical blooms, 
profoundly impress the stranger. The winter climate is superb, and the sunshine 
seems omnipresent, creeping into even the narrowest lanes and by-ways. 

In 1680, the people who had been encouraged to remove from the badly 
chosen site of a settlement which they had selected on the banks of the Ashley 
river in 1671, laid the foundations at Charleston, and the town at once sprang 
into activity. It began its commerce in dangerous times, for pirates hovered 
about the mouth of the Ashley, and many a good ship, laden with the produce 
of the plantations, and bound for Great Britain, was plundered, and its crew set 
on shore, or murdered, if resistance was offered. A hurricane also swept over 
the infant town, half ruining it; and then began a series of destructive fires, 
which, from 1680 to 1862, have, at fearfully short intervals, carried havoc and 
destruction into the homes of the wealthiest. 

In later years, too, the fleets of hostile Spaniards or Frenchmen sometimes 
brought panic even to Charleston bar; and the beacon fires on Sullivan's Island, 
in the harbor, warned the citizens to be on their guard. In 1728, a hurricane 
created an inundation, which overflowed the town and lowlands, forced the 
inhabitants to take refuge on the roofs of their dwellings, drove twenty-three fine 
ships ashore, and leveled many thousands of trees. In the same year came the 
yellow fever, sweeping off multitudes of whites and blacks. After the surrender, 
by the proprietary government, of its control of the province, into the hands of 
the sovereign of Great Britain, on the payment of a round sum of purchase 
money, Charleston became more prosperous than ever before. In 1765 it was 

described as " one of the first cities in 
British America, yearly advancing in 
size, riches and population." 

The approaches to Charleston from 
the sea are unique, and the stranger 
yields readily to the illusion that the 
city springs directly from the bosom 
of the waves. The bar at the harbor's 
g mouth will allow ships drawing seven- 
teen feet of water to pass over it. 
|:.. The entrance from the sea is com- 
H manded on either side by Morris and 
if Sullivan's Islands, the former the scene 
of terrific slaughter during the dread- 
ful days of 1863, and subsequently one 
of the points from which the Union 
forces bombarded Charleston ; and the latter at present a fashionable summer 
resort, crowded with fine mansions. On the harbor side of Sullivan's Island, Fort 
Moultrie, a solid and well-constructed fortification, frowns over the hurrying 
waters. Passing Sumter, which lies isolated and in semi-ruin, looking, at a dis- 




The old Charleston Post-office. fPage 441.] 



THE HARBOR QUARTER THE OLD POST-OFFICE. 



441 



tance, like some coral island pushed up from the depths, one sails by pleasant 
shores lined with palmettoes and grand moss-hung oaks, and by Castle Pinckney, 
and anchors at the substantial wharves of the proud little city. 

Many ships from many climes are anchored at these wharves, and the town 
seems the seaport of some thriving commercial State, so little does it represent 
the actual condition of South Carolina. The graceful Corinthian portico and 
columns of the new Custom-House, built of pure white marble, rise up near the 
water-side. There is a jolly refrain of the clinking of hammers, the rattling of 
drays, and the clanking of chains, which indicates much activity. Here some 
foreign vessel, which has come for phosphates, is unloading her ballast ; here a 
rice-schooner is unloading near a pounding-mill. On one hand are lumber- 
yards ; on another, cotton-sheds, filled with bales. Hundreds of negroes, scream- 




Houses on the Battery — Charleston. 

ing and pounding their mules, clatter along the piers and roadways; a great 
Florida steamer is swinging round, and starting on her ocean trip to the Penin- 
sula, with her decks crowded with Northern visitors. Along " East Bay " the 
houses are, in many places, solid and antique. The whole aspect of the harbor 
quarter is unlike that of any of our new and smartly painted Northern towns. 
In Charleston the. houses and streets have an air of dignified repose and solidity. 
At the foot of Broad street, a spacious avenue lined with banks and offices of 
professional men, stands the old " Post-office," a building of the colonial type, 
much injured during the late war, but since renovated at considerable expense. 
Most of the original material for the construction of the edifice was brought from 
England in 1761. Within its walls the voices of Rutledge, Pinckney, Gadsden, 
Lowndes and Laurens were raised to vehemently denounce the Government 



442 



CHARLESTON MANSIONS — KING STREET. 




A Charleston Mansion. 



against whose tyranny the " Thirteen original States " rebelled ; from the old 
steps Washington* addressed the Charlestonians in 1791 ; and for many years 
during this century it was an Exchange for the merchants of Charleston and 
vicinity. When the British occupied Charleston, the building was the scene of 

many exciting episodes. 
The basement was taken 
for a prison, and all who 
were devoted to the 
cause of American lib- 
erty were confined there- 
in. From that prison 
the martyr, Isaac Hayne, 
was led to execution; and 
in the cellar one hundred 
thousand pounds of 
powder lay safely hidden 
from the British during 
the whole time of their 
occupation. On the site 
of this building stood 
the old council -chamber 
and watch-house used in the days of the ''proprietary government." 

The original plan of Charleston comprised a great number of streets running 
at right angles, north and south, east and west, between the two rivers. But 
many of these streets were very narrow, being, in fact, nothing more than lanes ; 
and they have remained unchanged until the present day. The darkness and 
narrowness of the old lanes, the elder colonists thought, would keep away the 
glare of the bright sun; but the modern Charlestonians do not seem of their opin- 
ion, for they open wide avenues, and court the sun freely in their spacious and 
elegant mansions on the "Battery." Some of the Charleston avenues present a 
novel appearance, bordered as they are on either side by tall, weather-stained 
mansions, whose gable-ends front upon the sidewalks, and which boast verandas 
attached to each story, screened from the sun and from observation by ample 
wooden lattices, and by trellised vines and creepers. The high walls, which one 
sees so often in France and England, surround the majority of the gardens, and 
it is only through the gate, as in New Orleans, that one can catch a glimpse of 
the loveliness within. In some of the streets remote from the harbor front, the 
stillness of death or desertion reigns; many of the better class of mansions are 
vacant, and here and there the residence of some former aristocrat is now serving 
as an abode for a dozen negro families. 

On King street one sees the most activity in the lighter branches of trade ; 
there the ladies indulge in shopping, evening, morning, and afternoon ; there is 
located the principal theatre, the tasty, little "Academy of Music," and there also, 
are some elegant homes. Along that section of King street, near the crossing of 
Broad, however, are numerous little shops frequented by negroes, in which one 



NEAR THE ASHLEY RIVER MARKS OF THE FIRE. 



443 



sees the most extravagant array of gaudy but inexpensive articles of apparel; 
and of eatables which the negro palate cannot resist. The residence streets of 
the "Palmetto City," on the side next the Ashley river, are picturesque and lovely. 
They are usually bordered by many beautiful gardens. A labyrinth of long 
wooden piers and wharves runs out on the lagoons and inlets near the Ashley, 
and the boasted resemblance of Charleston to Venice is doubtless founded on 
the perfect illusion produced by a view of that section from a distance. The 
magnificent and the mean jostle each other very closely in all quarters. 




The Spire of 5t Philip's Church — Charleston. 

The stranger visiting Charleston is surprised to find that little has been done 
toward rebuilding that portion of the city swept away by fire in 1861. There 
are still gaps left in the heart of the populous sections ; one suddenly comes 
upon the scarred and scorched walls of a huge church, or the foundations 
of some immense block, in a location which it seems folly to leave unim- 
proved. But the Charlestonians explain that they do not need to rebuild as yet, 
for though the population is gradually increasing (it is now more than fifty 
thousand) the altered circumstances of some classes in society have compelled 
them to retire and make room for others. 



L„ 



THE VENICE OF AMERICA — CHARLESTON'S POLITICS. 
A LOVELY LOWLAND CITY — IMMIGRATION. 

IF we climb into the tower of the stately building known as the " Orphan 
House," some pleasant evening, when the sunset is beginning to throw 
the dark walls and picturesque groupings of the sea-girdled city into strong 
relief, we can get a panoramic glimpse of all the chief features of Charleston's 




The Orphan House — Charleston. 

exterior. We shall, perhaps, be too far from the Battery and its adjacent parks 
to note fully the effect of the gay group promenading the stone parapet against 
which the tides break gently, or to catch the perfect beauty of the palm-girt 
shores so distinctly visible beyond the Ashley's current, now that' the sunset has 
given them a blood-red background. The Battery is not crowded with carriages, 
as in those merry days when the State was still prosperous, or on that famous 
day when yonder black mass in the harbor was aflame, and when the flag of the 
nation which floated over it was hauled down. But it is one of the airiest and 
most elegant promenades possessed by any Southern city, and the streets leading 
to it are quaint and beautiful. The church spires here and there are noticeable, 
and that one glistening in the distance was a white mark fpr many a day for the 
Federal batteries ; yet few shells struck the stately steeple of St. Michael's, the 
old-fashioned, staid Episcopal house of prayer. 



BIRD S-EYE VIEW OF CHARLESTON. 



445 



Beyond this church one sees a mass of buildings, whose queer roofs and 
strangely shapen chimneys remind him of Antwerp or of Amsterdam. These date 
from colonial times ; it is the -Charleston of pre-revolutionary days which one sees 
clustered around St. Michael's. The bells were removed during the siege of 
Charleston to Columbia; were captured and accidentally cracked; were recovered, 
sent to England, and recast in the foundry in Whitechapel, from whence they were 
originally obtained. After the war they were put back in their place in the 
steeple with great rejoicing amongst the old Charlestonians. Yonder, nearer the 
harbor, out of Church street, arises another spire, the counterpart of St. Martin's 
in the Fields in London. It is the tower of St. Philip's, also an Episcopal church, 
and in the old graveyard opposite is a simple tomb in which repose the bones of 
John C. Calhoun. The statesman rests in an antiquated, yet beautiful corner of 
the town. The venerable cemetery is embowered in trees, and hemmed round 
about by old buildings with tiled roofs. The remains were removed when the 
Union forces seemed likely to capture Charleston, but were replaced in 1871. 
The formidable ruin, which the sunset-glow throws so sharply upon your vision, 
is the old cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar, destroyed in the last great fire. 
On its site, when the Charlestonians were compelled to surrender to the British, 
occurred a tremendous explosion, occasioned by the rage of the conquered. 





The Battery — Charleston. 

They were compelled to deposit their arms at the arsenal, which was also a pow- 
der magazine, and all coming at once, and hurling down upon the ground hun- 
dreds of fire-arms, an explosion took place, igniting twenty thousand pounds of 

powder and blowing to atoms the adjacent Lunatic Asylum, Poor- House, Guard- 
29 



440 ARCHITECTURE POLITICS. 

House, and Barracks, as well as conquerors and conquered. The city has many 
other interesting churches, among them the Huguenot, which has on its walls 
numerous interesting ancient inscriptions. Grace Church (Episcopal) is the 
resort of the fashionable worshipers. 

There is nothing remarkable in the secular architecture of Charleston ; yet 
this old Orphan House, from whose tower we survey the others, with its lovely 




'Wm. 

The Grave of John C Calhoun — Charleston. [Page 445. J 

garden hedged in from the street, with its statue of William Pitt, which the grate- 
ful citizens erected when the "stamp act" was repealed, is imposing. It was 
founded in 1790, is bountifully endowed, and .thousands of orphan boys and girls 
have been well cared for within its walls. John C. Fremont and the Carolinian 
Memminger were educated there. There is an institution of the same class 
for the colored people. Neither the hotels nor the banks are distinguished for 
architectural excellence. The Charleston Hotel has an immense stone- pillared 
piazza fronting on Meeting street, but the Mills House and the Pavilion are 
simply solid blocks. 

The Charleston Club- House is an elegant structure, and the building of the 
South CarolineftTall is fine in interior arrangement. The Club- House has become 
the seat of the Federal courts, and white and black men sit together in juries 
there. The Court-House and the City Hall are substantial edifices, fronting each 
other on corners of Broad and Meeting streets. Around them are always loung- 
ing crowds of negro men and women, as if they delighted to linger in the atmos- 
phere of government and law, to the powers and responsibilities of which they 
have lately been introduced. At the Guard- House one may note white and 
black policemen on terms of amity. 

Charleston prospers despite the anomalous condition of politics and society in 
the State. What might she not become if the commonwealth were developed to 
its utmost ? The citizens suffer many trying ills, the most aggravated of which 
is the small role that the present leaders of the majority permit them to play in 
State politics. The Legislature has out-Napoleoned Napoleon TIL in measures for 
the corruption of suffrage, and has enacted an infamous law, which allows Gov- 
ernors of the State to control the ballot-box completely through commissioners 



ELECTIONS IN CHARLESTON. 



447 



appointed virtually by himself. Its vote is swallowed up in the vote of Charles- 
ton county, and consequently it is represented only at second-hand in the State 
Assembly, getting but a meagre and partial hearing through a score of ignorant 
negroes, sent from the plantations and small towns in the vicinity. 

The first election in Charleston after reconstruction was held in 1868, and the 
Republican candidate for Mayor, Pillsbury, was elected by a majority of twenty- 
three in a poll of 10,000. He remained in office until the summer of 187 1, when 
the Conservatives attempted a fusion, and ran a ticket composed of white and black 
candidates, against the Republicans, with John A. Wagener, a German, for Mayor, 
and elected him by JJJ majority. This administration had continued to the date 
of my visit, in 1873, when a new election took place, and exhibited in the most 
glaring light some of the atrocities of the present system. The Conservatives 
alleged, and it was, indeed, clearly proven, that four hundred negroes were imported 
from Edisto Island at one time, to create a majority in Charleston for the so-called 
"Republicans." None but Radical supervisors of the elections were appointed, 
and the right of challenge at every poll-precinct was denied. The law required 
every person voting to swear that he was a citizen of Charleston, but the imported 
voters were provided with the printed forms of the oath, from which the clause 
concerning the place of residence was omitted. 

With no power of interference, and no chance to dispute at the polls or in the 
counting of the votes, this city of 50,000 inhabitants, possessing $30,000,000 
worth of taxable property, was delivered over, bound hand and foot, to the tender 





The Ruins of St. Finbar Cathedral — Charleston. [Page 443.] 

mercies of the ignorant and the vicious. The party then in power admitted the 
abnormal condition of affairs. Governor Moses told an editor in Charleston that 
every citizen of South Carolina could vote in that city, if he chose, without 
hindrance ; the Charlestonians could not help themselves. 



44-8 TRICKERY BY NEGROES AND CARPET-BAGGERS. 

The result of this latter election, in which the negro party was, of course, vic- 
torious, was a ferment, culminating in mass-meetings, investigations, and finally 
in a series of arguments. It was charged and shown that the commissioners for 
the elections did not designate all the polling-places so that the general public 
would know where they were, but that they stealthily opened them during the 
election, and there " rushed through " the illegal voters. It was also affirmed 
by the supporters of the corrupt State Government that a "residence in the city 
without limit as to time," in the county, sixty days, and in the State, one year, 
were qualifications sufficient for a voter under the act of 1873. The board of 
managers consisted, at the city election in 1873, almost entirely of negroes. 
Several hundred special deputy sheriffs were appointed to " maintain order " if 
the Conservatives made any attempt to challenge voters at the polls ; and the 
managers refused to give the reporters of the city press any information concern- 
ing the changes made in the polling-places the night before the election. The 
Republican or Radical ticket was elected, and the protest of the citizens of 
Charleston having been entered, the "board of commissioners," appointed by the 
Legislature, then published a formal announcement that the election was " legal 
and valid," and that the "protest was overruled." 

The Conservatives were bitterly grieved at this, as they had made a very firm 
stand, and it showed them how completely they were at the mercy of their 
present masters. They were not especially dissatisfied with the choice for Mayor, 
as the successful candidate, Mr. Cunningham, is an honest man ; but the other 
municipal officers elected they regarded quite differently. The present police 
force of the city is about equally divided into black and white, and there are nine 
colored aldermen in the new board. It is not because of the presence of the 
negro in these offices of trust and honor that the Charlestonians are angry and 
grieved, but because he refuses them their proper share in the government. 
As they are now situated, the intelligence and property of the city are as 
completely shut out from political representation as if they were imprisoned 
within walls of adamant. 

Charleston's city tax, in 1872, amounted to two per cent, but in 1873 was 
somewhat reduced. The combined city, county, and State tax, however, now 
amounts to three and a-half per cent. The assessments are always fully up to, 
and usually over, the actual value of property. The property holder, in the first 
instance, makes his returns. If the county auditor is not satisfied with the esti- 
mates, he changes them to suit himself; and the citizen then has the refuge of 
appeal to a "board of equalization." The Constitution requires that all property 
be taxed at its value. 

The present city debt is nearly $5,000,000, some of which was incurred by 
subscriptions to railroads before the war. The city, before the war, invested 
$1,000,000 in the Blue Ridge railroad, and the State about $1,300,000. In 
1868 or '69, the State stock, a majority, was sold for $13,000, to a ring. Shortly 
before this the State had guaranteed $4,000,000 of bonds of the road; these were 
hypothecated by the company. The ring secured the passage of a law authoriz- 
ing the State Treasurer to issue $1,800,000 of revenue bond scrip upon the 



LICENSES THE CHICAGO AND CHARLESTON RAIL ROUTE. 



449 



surrender to him of the $4,000,000 guaranteed bonds, said scrip receivable for 
taxes. Exchange was made, and bonds have been canceled, but the State 
Supreme Court has decided that the act authorizing the issue of the scrip is 
unconstitutional and void. The " licenses " which business and professions are 
already compelled to submit to are 
grievous burdens, and the people con- 
sider them such an odious form of 
municipal taxation that when the 
Legislature passed a law for collect- 
ing State licenses also, it was resisted, 
and finally its repeal was deemed 
expedient. The astute legislators even 
imposed a license -tax upon the rail- 
roads, which were, of course, already 
licensed by charter. 

Thus cut off, politically, Charles- 
ton, with grim patience, awaits a turn 
in the tide of affairs, and catches a 
little inspiration from the development 
of the scheme for a new railway route 
from Chicago to Charleston. This 
superb air line, when built, will 
pass by Columbia and Spartan- 
burg, in South Carolina, northward 
to Asheville, in the North Carolina 
mountains — thence through Cumber- 
land Gap into Lexington, in Kentucky, and so onward to Chicago, giving an 
outlet on the sea 100 miles nearer the North-west than New York now is by 
any existing line. The towns mentioned above are situated directly on the route 
originally projected for the connection between the North-west and the Atlantic, 
and pronounced by all who have surveyed it as one of the most economical 
and practical ways across the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies " to be found 
from the head -waters of the Susquehanna to the southern termination of 
those ranges." 

The extensive marl-beds of the South Carolina lowlands, all comparatively 
near Charleston, have long been known ; but they were first especially noticed 
by Edmund Ruffin, of Virginia, a noted agriculturist, who had been very suc- 
cessful in renovating worn-out lands in his own State with marl. He examined 
the South Carolina marls, and found them much richer in carbonate of lime 
than those of Virginia, but the carbonate was so combined with and miner- 
alized by silex, oxide of iron, phosphate of lime, and other substances, as to 
necessitate a chemical change by burning before it could be applied to agri- 
cultural purposes. 

Among these marl deposits, which abound in the immediate vicinity of 
Charleston, are found hard nodular bodies of all sizes, varying from that of a 




^B^msmm 



"The highways leading out of the city are all richly 
embowered in loveliest foliage." [Page 451.] 



45o 



THE PHOSPHATES OF SOUTH CAROLINA. 



pin's head to masses weighing hundreds of pounds. These nodules are now 
known as phosphate rock, and have been described as " incalculable heaps of 
animal remains thrown or washed together." Beautiful specimens of ribs, 
vertebras, and teeth of land and sea monsters of the early tertiary period are 
found in profusion at a little distance below the surface, and are readily dug 
up with pick and shovel. The negroes are said even to dive for them to the 
river-beds, and to bring up large quantities. 

The people have at last awakened to the immense value of these deposits, 
and a number of establishments devoted to their conversion into phosphate- 
manures have sprung up since the war. In these manufactories the nodules 
are baked thoroughly dry, then ground to a powder, which is finally mixed with 
sulphuric acid and charged with ammonia. The Wando Company, which first 




Magnolia Cemetery — Charleston. [Page 451.] 

undertook the production of these fertilizers, made thirty per cent, profit, and there 
are now two dozen companies in the State organized for the purposes either of 
mining or manufacturing these phosphates. One company is organized with a 
capital of $2,000,000 to mine in all the navigable rivers in the State; and there are 
several manufacturing corporations which have each a million dollars capital. 
The Etiwan Company claims to have the largest acid-chamber in the United 
States; and in the Wando, Etiwan, Pacific, Guano, Atlantic, Stono and Wap- 
poo mills, four or five millions of dollars have been invested since 1868. 

Important as is this industry, there are a variety of others already devel- 
oped in Charleston which promise great future success. In the manufacture 
of doors, blinds, sashes, and machinery, and in ship -building, a large capital 



DESERTED HOMES AND PLANTATIONS. 451 

is invested. The enterprising citizens are even constructing ready-made houses 
and churches, which can be shipped in sections to new States and territories. 
A cotton-mill and several tanneries are projected. The "truck farms" vie 
with those of Norfolk, and are supplying the Northern markets with early 
vegetables. The city's jobbing trade amounted to about $6,000,000 in 1872, 
and steadily increases at the rate of twenty- five per cent. 

The highways leading out of the city are all richly embowered in loveliest 
foliage ; the oak, the magnolia, the myrtle, the jessamine, vie with each other in 
tropical splendor. Splendid shell roads have been projected, but are not yet 
completed. The visitor hardly knows which most to admire — the cultivated 
bloom and glory of the gardens, the tangled thickets where the luxuriant cane 
rises thirty and forty feet, the shimmering sheets of water on the marshes, or the 
long sandy pathways, over which stretch the long arms of moss-hung oaks. A 
palmetto, standing lonely under the rich glow of the splendid Southern moon, 
will fill even the prosaic with poetic enthusiasm ; a cabin, overgrown with vines 
and tendrils, and half concealed in a green and odorous thicket, behind which 
one catches the gleam of the river current, will make one enamored of the sweet 
silence and restful perfection of the lowland capital's suburbs. The mansion with 
closed doors, and decaying verandas, from which 

" Life and thought have gone away," 

will recall the late revolution's worst phase to him who had almost forgotten it in 
the city's commercial bustle. 

Along the Ashley, the old manorial houses and estates, like Drayton Hall 
and the Middleton homestead, stand like sorrowful ghosts lamenting the past; on 
James's Island one may wander among rich cotton plantations, now overspread- 
ing the maze of fortifications which sprang up during the war ; there is no more 
silence and absolute calm, as there is no more of beauty and luxuriance, in Magnolia 
cemetery, than in the vast parks surrounding these ruined and desolate homes. 
The monuments in the cemetery to Simons, and Legare, and Colonel Washing- 
ton, and Vanderhorst, are beautiful and tasteful ; so are the battered and broken 
monuments to a dead civilization and a broken-down system which one finds 
upon the old plantations. 

There is a wide belt of forsaken plantations near the Cooper river, along 
the famous Goose creek, upon whose banks stands the venerable St. James's 
Church, built in 171 1. Around this ancient building the ambitious forest 
is fast weaving a network difficult to penetrate ; and the very graves are 
hidden under festoons of wild vines and flowers. Along the harbor there 
are also deserted and bankrupt towns, like pretty Mount Pleasant, filled with 
moss-grown and rotting houses, whose owners have fled, unless too poor 
to get away. 

The climate of South Carolina being as mild and genial as that of the 
most favored portion of southern Europe, it is not strange that the lower 
classes of Italy and other countries should feel inclined to emigrate to the 
Palmetto State. But the people have been slow to show a proper intelligence 



452 



IMMIGRATION 



-THE NEGRO S VIEWS OF IT. 



on the subject of immigration. The legislators have taken care to encourage cer- 
tain Northern classes to come — since they are sure that they will not ; and have 
discouraged foreigners from attempting to settle in the State, since they fear that 
might lead to a new deal in politics. The Italians who went into the common- 
wealth some time since were offered $100 per year, and a little meal and 
bacon weekly ; but they haughtily rejected any such terms. The white laborer 
who enters South Carolina must be offered good w r ages and given land at cheap 
rates ; and the sooner the natives learn that he is not to be expected to work 
and live as the negroes do, the better it will be for their interest. 

Recently the whites have become thoroughly aroused to the importance of 
this subject, and there is a great change in the temper with which immigrants 
are now received. The determination seems to be to make much of them as 




msBBm&~7. 



Garden in Mount Pleasant, opposite Charleston. [Page 451.] 



a sure, if slow, means of working out the political regeneration or the State, 
and securing its material prosperity. A State Commissioner of Immigration 
was appointed by the late Taxpayers' Convention, and the counties are appoint- 
ing local Commissioners. An effort is now making at Charleston to establish 
a direct steamship line to Liverpool, which, it is hoped, will not only give a 
stimulus to immigration, but to inward freights as well. 

The negro is not especially anxious to see immigration come in. The 
spirit of race is strong within him. He is desirous of seeing the lands in the 
commonwealth in the hands of his own people before the rest of the world's 
poor are invited to partake. He is impressed with the idea that South Caro- 
lina should be in some measure a black man's government, and is jealous of 



the African's spirit of race. 



453 



white intervention. This is not the sentiment, certainly, of the intelligent and 
refined colored people, but the mass are ignorant, and think that they are 
right in taking that stand. The black man lets the African in him run riot 
for the time being. He even dislikes to see the mulatto progress ; and when 
he criticises him, it is as he were necessarily an inferior. 

So, too, the negro secretly dislikes the white adventurer, or " carpet-bagger," 
as our Southern friends call him. Black rogue has quickly learned from white 
rogue all he wishes to know, and now proposes to go alone. The idea of 
Nemesis, added to the negro's lack of moral consciousness, which has become so 
pronounced in the two centuries of servitude, makes the negro believe that he is 
right in stealing and oppressing. He has found, now that he has obtained power, 
a strange fascination in the use of political machinery for purposes of oppression 
and spoliation. He thinks too, grimly, in the words of the Carolinian black's 
savage song : 

" De bottom rail 's on de top, 
An' we 's gwine to keep it dar." 




Peeping Through. 



LI. 

THE SPOLIATION OF SOUTH CAROLINA. 

THE political troubles between the white and the black natives in South 
Carolina began directly after the close of the war. The mass of undis- 
franchised whites, embittered by and disgusted with the revolution, refused to 
have anything whatever to do with the new edifice which the negroes were 
trying to upbuild. Had they frankly accepted the situation, they might have 
had a share in the framing of the new Constitution. The negroes, left alone, 
were soon interested in the advent of white strangers, who agreed to teach 
them the political role they were called upon to play. Some of these new- 
comers were honest men ; others were thieves. The convention for the making 
of a new Constitution was at once a ludicrous and an impressive gathering. 
The Constitution was ratified at a general election, held on the 14th, 15th, 
and 16th days of April, 1868. South Carolina then entered upon her first 
experience of negro government. 

Governor Orr left the State executive chair on July 6, 1868. The common- 
wealth then had a bonded debt of about $5,500,000, and a floating indebtedness 
amounting to perhaps $1,500,000 more. While the condition of the finances 
was not hopeful, it was still far from desperate. People hoped that a new 
railroad development would open up fresh trade, that money would flow in. 
The abominable and atrocious outrages of the Ku-Klux, however, were an 
effective obstacle to Northern immigration. 

The Klan was imported into South Carolina in 1868, before the present 
State Government was organized ; and the .white population of the ruder and 
remote counties tried to inaugurate a reign of terror among the negroes. The 
chairman of the Republican State Central Committee was brutally murdered 
in the fall of 1868. Hundreds of men were taken from their homes at night 
and whipped ; some were murdered. The result was the interference of the 
Federal Government, the arrest and imprisonment of members of the organ- 
ization, and the breaking up of its secret operations. 

But while society was completely unsettled, while the whites were smarting 
under the humiliation of being crowded out of the representation to which 
they were entitled, while the negro was master, and was beginning to be 
insolent and aggressive, the Legislature met. The first session after recon- 
struction was held in August of 1868. At a later session, Governor Scott, 
formerly an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, sent in his first message, in which 
he reviewed the financial condition of the State, and the Ku-Klux outrages, 
then at their height, and counseled moderation and firmness. 



THE EPOCH OF CORRUPTION IN SOUTH CAROLINA. 455 

The negroes nearly filled both Senate and House ; there were but few white 
members during the first session, when the ignorant blacks were learning parlia- 
mentary forms, for which, by the way, they have an extraordinary aptitude. 
Jobs began to appear, and the first drawing of blood may be said to have been 
in connection with the job for the redemption of the bills of the bank of the State. 
The strong influenced the weak ; the negro, dazzled and enlivened by the pros- 
pect of the reception of sums which seemed to him colossal fortunes, soon became 
an apt scholar, and needed but little prompting from his white teachers. Meas- 
ures for authorizing the Governor to borrow on the credit of the State were at 
once inaugurated ; and then began a series of acts whose results are without a 
parallel in the history of revolutions. 

During the four years from 1868 to 1872 inclusive, the bonded debt was 
increased from five and a-half to sixteen millions, and the floating debt, which 
could be only vaguely rtscertained, amounted to several millions more. The 
following tabular statement of the debt is compiled from the books of the State 

Treasurer : 

Legal bonded debt $9,886,627 . 35 

Illegal bonded debt • 5,965,000.00 

Legal floating debt 2,429,272.95 

Illegal floating debt 2,692, 102 . 94 

Contingent liabilities 4,797,608 . 20 

Total $25,770,611 44 

If the actual and contingent liabilities, bonded and floating debt, legal and 
illegal, are to be taken into account, then the actual debt is the whole amount 
stated above; and less in proportion as any of the constituent items are excluded. 

Honest Republicans had raised their voices loudly against the infamies which 
were the cause of this terrible increase ; had endeavored to oust the thieves, and 
failing, had left the party in disgust. The negroes were intoxicated with power, 
and would hear of nothing which seemed likely to better the condition of their 
old masters. 

In 1870, the Conservatives, as the white natives style themselves, alarmed at 
the riot of corruption and the total disregard of decency manifested by the gov- 
erning powers, rallied and made a decided effort to get the State into their own 
hands. They nominated R. B. Carpenter, a Republican Circuit Judge, for Gov- 
ernor, on the simple yet broad platform of retrenchment and reform. On their 
tickets a few negroes were represented, and for the first time in the history of 
the State, negroes and Conservative whites spoke upon the same political stump. 
But the leaders of the negroes refused to believe in the sincerity of the ex- Con- 
federates, and Governor Scott was re-elected over Carpenter. The Ring which was 
soiling its guilty fingers with plunder was jubilant; honest Republicans hung their 
heads with shame and gave up all hope of the State ; the native white Carolinians, 
angered and distressed, and fearing that the negroes might undertake some 
measures to which resistance would be necessary, formed themselves into a 
"council of safety." This is said really to have been simply an organization 
to enable planters to protect themselves against strikes, at most a purely 



456 PLUNDERING OF THE STATE TREASURY. 

defensive organization, and not an attempt at a revival of Ku-Kluxism, as it has 
sometimes been called. It had no hold in the lower part of the State, but in 
the upper counties seems to have been perverted into Ku-Kluxism. 

The offer of amity which it had cost the pride of the Conservatives such an 
abasement to make is not likely to be repeated at once. The struggle was 
great, the result unsatisfactory. People now grimly submit to be robbed without 
attempting resistance save at election-time. But the hostility which they 
naturally feel toward the acts of the present State Administration is constantly 
increased ; and in the biting criticisms evoked from the press of Charleston so 
much truth has been told that the outside world has begun to believe in the state- 
ment that the revolution has been made an instrument of fraud and oppression. 

Although it would seem an infamy simply to deliberately increase the debt 
of a State which had been so terribly impoverished as had South Carolina by the 
war (her total valuation having decreased in ten years from $489,319,128 to 
$164,409,941), this was but the -beginning of the outrage. Not only was the 
debt increased, but the revenues of the State were diverted from their proper 
channels into the pockets of the thieves ; and it has been incontrovertibly proven 
that millions have been added to the State debt without the authority of the 
Legislature. By the official statement of the Treasurer of the Commonwealth, 
the public debt at the close of the fiscal year ending October 31, 1871, amounted 
to $15,851,327.35. This showed an actual increase since the advent of the 
reconstruction legislature of $10,500,000, of which amount only $4,389,400 had 
ever been in any manner authorized by the legal representatives of the State. 
And it is considered certain that in 1872 there were already afloat upon the market, 
very possibly in the hands of innocent holders, without any authority in their 
original issue, some $6,000,000 in conversion bonds ; and it was found necessary 
to introduce an act, in 1872, to ratify and confirm this illegal issue, for which the 
" Financial Board," composed of the Governor, the State Treasurer, and the 
Attorney- General, were responsible.* 

Immense sums of money were collected during the four years from 1868 to 
the beginning of 1872. The people of the State contributed $3,780,000 in taxes, 
and the financial agents at New York sold bonds to the amount of $2,282,000. 
Add to this $1,000,000 of taxes collected up to the close of 1872, and it will be 
seen that more than $7,000,000 went into the Treasury during two admin- 
istrations. 

This revenue, which, in view of the impoverishment caused by the war, was 
very encouraging, has been stolen from the State in a variety of ways. The 
officers have never been governed by the Appropriation acts ; have never been 
limited by them. The money appropriated for one purpose has been unblush- 
ingly expended for another. No honest debts were paid with all the money 
collected from the white people who are denied the right of representation in this 

*At the last session, 1873-74, an act was passed declaring that these bonds, known as Con- 
version Bonds, amounting to $5,965,000 were put upon the market "without any authority of 
law," and were " absolutely null and void." A joint resolution was passed for the prosecution of 
the ex-State Treasurer, but this joint resolution is " lost " from the records. 



THE LAND COMMISSION THE SINKING FUND. 457 

black Legislature, — not a debt during the year 1873. The bondholders have not 
received the interest upon their bonds. 

The frauds to which the Legislature lent itself and which private individuals 
perpetrated, were contemptible. A land commission was established. It was 
ostensibly beneficent. Its apparent purpose was to buy up lands, and distribute 
them among the freedmen. An appropriation of $700,000 was granted for that 
purpose. The State was at once robbed. Worthless land was purchased and 
sold at fabulous sums to the Government. The commissioners were generally 
accused of extensive corruption. When at last an honest commissioner came in 
it was found that a quarter of a million dollars had been stolen. The "Sinking 
Fund Commission," is another "oubliette" into which money raised from the State 
sinks mysteriously. The commissioners of this fraud were authorized to take 
and sell real and personal property belonging to the State, and to report annu- 
ally to the Legislature the sums received. Public property has rapidly disap- 
peared, but no report has ever been made.* The pockets of an unknown few 
contain the proceeds of much valuable State property. 

This is mighty theft; colossal impudence like this was never surpassed. 
Never was a revolution, originally intended as humane, turned to such base uses. 
Never were thieves permitted to go unpunished after such bold and reckless 
wickedness. Never before were a people, crushed to earth, kept down and throt- 
tled so long. The manliness which we received as a precious legacy with our 
Anglo-Saxon blood demands that we should cry out, " Hold off your hands ! 
Fair play ! " 

The complete centralization which has been the result of the long continuance 
in power of an ignorant Legislature, controlled by designing men, is shown in the 
history of the elections since reconstruction. The Governor has the power to 
appoint commissioners, who in their turn appoint managers of elections in the 
several counties. In this manner the Governor has absolute control of the elec- 
tions, for the managers are allowed to keep and count the votes, and are not 
compelled to report for some days. 

The chances thus given for fraud are limitless. For the last four years men 
who have been elected by overwhelming majorities have been coolly counted out, 
because they were distasteful to the powers that be. The negroes intimidate 
their fellows who desire ,to vote reform tickets, very much as the Ku-Klux once 
intimidated them. " The villainy you teach me I will execute." 

People will say that this is a black picture. It is ; there is no light upon it. 
There seems small hope for a change. The election this year will oust some 
plunderers, but will not be likely to check corruption. The white people of the 
State are powerless to resist; they are trampled completely down. 

It is impossible to here review in detail all the transactions of the Legis- 
lature since 1868. Besides the schemes for corruption above mentioned, there 

*An investigating committee of the State Senate on the sinking fund reported, in February 
1874, that the proceedings of the Sinking Fund Commission have resulted in nothing but loss to 
the State ; that a large amount of property had been sold, and not a dollar of the public debt had 
been extinguished. 



45§ VARIOUS FRAUDS COLUMBIA. 

have been very many others. Nothing, has been safe from the taint. Bribery 
has been necessary to secure the passage of almost every bill. Railroad legisla- 
tion has been a stench in honest men's nostrils. The pay certificates of the 
Legislature have even been abused. The Speaker of the House has issued these 
certificates to the amount of more than a million dollars, while the legitimate 
demand for them has not amounted to $150,000. They have been spread broad- 
cast. The refurnishing of the new State-House cost hardly $50,000, but a bill 
for $95,000 was presented. Members of the Legislature, both black and white, 
publicly threatened that unless they received sums which they named they would 
vote against certain bills. A Governor stands charged by men of his own party 
with spending nearly $400,000 of the public money to get himself re-chosen. A 
bill to establish a militia became a gigantic "job." The whole course of legisla- 
tion in the State tended to absolute tyranny, which is all the more dreadful 
because the deluded ignoramuses who make up the body of the assemblies are 
not aware that they are doing anything especially blameworthy. They look 
upon it as the result of a normal condition of things, and intend to keep it up as 
long as there is any vestige of State credit left. 

Columbia has been the capital of South Carolina since 1790. It occupies a 
high and commanding position in the centre of the State, and is but 130 miles 
from Charleston. It borders upon the Congaree river, near the mouth of the 
Saluda, in the heart of a rich cotton region. The water power which might be 
made available in its immediate vicinity is much superior to that of most of the 
New England manufacturing towns. The canal near by was purchased from 
the State several years ago by Governor Sprague, of Rhode Island ; but no cot- 
ton factories have as yet arisen along the banks. The town is one of the most 
beautiful in the South; its climate rivals that of Italy; and the broad, richly 
shaded avenues; the gardens filled with jessamines and japonicas, laurels and haw- 
thorns and hollys, and the perfect groves in which the live oaks, the pines, the 
magnolias, and the wild oranges vie with each other in charm, give it an especial 
fascination. Columbia arose with sorrowful but reliant air out of the ashes 
in which it was laid by the war ; and if its people had not been weighted down 
bv the incubus of an ignorant and dishonest government, they would have done 
more even than they already have toward rebuilding. The little city, which now 
has about 12,000 inhabitants, is on the through route from Charlotte in North 
Carolina, to Augusta in Georgia, and also sends its commercial influence into the 
north-western counties, along the line of the Greenville and Columbia railroad, 
on which Newbeny and other thriving towns are located. It has also an excel- 
lent connection with "Wilmington on the North Carolina coast via Sumter, a busy 
town, a short distance to the westward of Columbia. 

The counties of Richland, Sumter, Orangeburg, Lexington, and Clarendon, in 
the neighborhood of the capital, are exempt from the malaria of the lowlands, and 
cotton, corn, and other cereals, grow superbly. The great conflagration at the 
time of the evacuation of the city by the Confederates, swept away the Govern- 
ment armory, the old State-House, some manufactories, all the railway stations, 
a fine legislative library, St. Mary's College, with many valuable collections of 



EXTERIOR ASPECTS OF COLUMBIA. 



459 



paintings ; the retreating Confederates destroyed the bridges over the river, and 
ruin reigned everywhere. 

The exterior aspects of Columbia are to-day fair indeed. The venerable 
University (from which all the white professors and scholars retreated when the 
first black student was received) nestles charmingly in the midst of a grand tree- 
dotted park ; the State Lunatic Asylum, a noble building, is likewise embowered 
in a splendid shade ; the city buildings and hotels are large, and in excellent 
taste; a fine United States court-house is springing out of blocks of native gran- 
ite ; and the numerous private institutions of learning give the casual visitor the 
impression that he is visiting a "grove of Academe," rather than a perturbed and 
harassed capital. Many Northern families have purchased fine estates in the 
neighborhood; at evening the avenues are crowded with splendid teams, whose 
owners drive to the parade ground, and loiter, while six companies of United 
States troops go stiffly through the prescribed drill, and the band thunders the 
hackneyed music. 




A Future Politician. 



LII. 



THE NEGROES IN ABSOLUTE POWER. 



BUT it is at the State- House in Columbia that one arrives at the truth. 
The mammoth building, which yet lacks the stately cupola to be given 
it in a few years, is furnished with a richness and elegance which not even 
the legislative halls of States a hundred times as rich can equal. In the 
poorly constructed and badly lighted corridors below are the offices of the State 
Government — that of the Governor, the Treasurer, the Secretary of State, and 

the Superintendent of State 
Schools — eacji and all of 
them usually filled with 
colored people, discussing 
the issues of the hour. The 
Secretary of State is a 
mulatto, who has entered 
the law school at the Uni- 
versity, and carries on his 
double duties very credit- 
ably. 

In the House and Sen- 
ate the negro element 
stands out conspicuous. 
On the occasion of my first 

The State -House at Columbia, South Carolina. visit I W3S shown into the 

room of the House Committee on the Judiciary for a few moments. While 
awaiting the assembling of the honorable members a colored gentleman, in a 
gray slouch hat, and a pair of spectacles, engaged me in conversation, and, as I 
inquired what was the present question which was exciting the patriotism and 
sacrifice of the virtuous members, he rolled up his eyes, and with a tragic 
air, said : 

" Dar 's a heap o' bizness behin' de carpet heah, sah." 

It was true, in more senses than one. 

The Hoase, when I visited it, was composed of eighty-three colored members, 
all of whom were Republicans, and forty-one whites ; the Senate consisted of 
fifteen colored men, ten white Republicans, and eight white Democrats. The 
President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, both colored, were elegant 
and accomplished men, highly educated, who would have creditably presided 
over any commonwealth's legislative assembly. In the House the negroes were 




THE NEGROES AND THEIR LEGISLATIVE SPEECHES. 46I 

of a much lower grade, and more obviously ignorant, than in the Senate. They 
were perpetually preventing the transaction of necessary business by " questions 
of privilege," and "points of order," of which, sometimes, as many as a hundred 
are raised in a single day. It being an extra session, they were endeavoring to 
make it last until the time for the assembling of the regular one ; and their efforts 
were extremely ludicrous. The little knot of white Democrats, massed together 
in one section of the hall, sat glum and scornful amid the mass of black speakers, 
a member only rising now and then to correct an error of "his friend" the 
colored man, who had the floor. 

But some of the sable brethren were trying to the visitor's patience, even, and 
after I had heard one young man talk for a half hour upon the important subject 
of what his constituents would say if he allowed himself to be brow-beaten into 
an immediate adjournment, it was with difficulty that I could suppress a yawn. 
This youth persisted in repetitions; his voice occasionally would be heard 
rising above the general hum, precisely reiterating the words he had uttered five 
minutes before. 

The negro does not allow himself to be abashed by hostile criticism. When 
he gets a sentence tangled, or cannot follow the thread of his own thought in 
words, he will gravely open a book — the statutes, or some other ponderous 
volume lying before him — and, after seeming to consult it for some minutes, will 
resume. He has been gaining time for a new start. 

There are men of real force and eloquence among the negroes chosen to the 
House, but they are the exception. In the Senate I noticed decorum and 
ability among the members. Several of the colored Senators spoke exceed- 
ingly well, and with great ease and grace of manner ; others were awkward and 
coarse. The white members, native and imported, appeared men of talent at 
least. The black pages ran to and fro, carrying letters and documents to the 
honorable Senators ; and a fine-looking quadroon, or possibly octoroon woman, 
and the ebony gentleman escorting her, were admitted to the floor of the Senate, 
and sat for some time listening to the debates. 

To the careless observer it seems encouraging to see the negroes, so lately 
freed from a semi-barbaric condition, doing so well, because their conduct is 
really better than one would suppose them capable of, after having seen the 
constituency from which they were elevated. One cannot, of course, prevent 
reflections upon vengeance and retribution drifting into his mind, — it was, 
doubtless, to be expected that some day the negro would lord it over his master, 
as the law of compensation is immutable, — but there is danger in the protraction 
of this vengeance. We must really see fair play. Ignorance must not be allowed 
to run riot. If we saw it consummating, as a Commune assembled in Paris, one 
thousandth part of the infamy which it effects as a Legislature in South Carolina, 
we should cry out angrily for interference. 

But this is an epoch of transition. When the negro is a little older as a 
politician, he will be less clannish. The masses of the blacks will divide more 
fully into parties. Then there will be some chance for the setting aside of the 
dreadful question of race against race. At present the blacks in the State move 

30 



462 



THE UNIVERSITY A REVOLUTION IN ITS CONDUCT. 



solidly together. Their eyes are fixed on the spoils which the white men have 
taught them to gather. They have not yet begun to understand that in strip- 
ping the State, compromising her credit and blackening her reputation, they 
injure themselves much more than they harm their old masters. They will learn 
in time that they have committed a grave error in allowing the whites to be 
virtually excluded from representation, and that both races will be forced to labor 
together, honestly and faithfully, to save the State, and to insure their own future 
prosperity. 

I visited the University a day or two after the revolution caused there by the 
entrance of the first colored student, the Secretary of State himself. In the 
library, where the busts of Calhoun and Hayne seemed to look down from their 




Sketches of South Carolina State Officers and Legislators, under the Moses Administration. 

niches with astonishment upon the changed order of things, I saw the book from 
whose lists the white students had indignantly erased their names when they saw 
the Secretary's round, fair script beneath their own. The departure of the old 
professors and scholars was the signal for a grand onward movement by the 
blacks, and a great number entered the preparatory and the law schools. They 



LEGISLATORS AS LAW STUDENTS — EDUCATION IN THE STATE. 463 

have summoned good teachers from the North, and are studying earnestly. The 
University attained its present title in 1866. It was founded as a college at the 
beginning of the century, but now consists of ten distinct schools, and is rich in 
libraries and apparatus for scientific studies. While I was in the library, a coal 
black senator arrived, with two members of the House, whom he presented to 
the head of the faculty as desirous of entering the law class. I was informed that 
dozens of members were occupied every spare moment outside of the sessions in 
faithful study ; but this has been the case for a short time only. 

Except in the large towns, however, the educational prospects throughout the 
State are not very good. In 1873, the schools were much cramped for resources. 
Not a cent of an appropriation of these $300,000 for educational purposes, made 
in 'that year, reached the schools, and great numbers of them were closed. The 
difficulty of obtaining good teachers has also been very great. Charleston has 
had a fine school system for many years. Another High School there, an excel- 
lent institution, has been established since 1839. The local school tax for 1873 
Avas nearly $45,000. There are about 2,500 white children in the public schools, 
and about the same number of colored pupils, for whom separate accommodations 
are provided. One single edifice for the black has room for 1,000 scholars. 

Four colored schools are supported in Charleston by Northern funds : The 
Shaw Memorial, a large and efficient institution, assisted by the New England 
Freedmen's Aid Society; the Wallingford Academy, by the Presbyterian Church 
North; the Avery Institute, by the American Missionary School Association ; 
and the Franklin Street High School, by the Episcopal Church North. All the 
city free schools are considered exceedingly good. The Normal School in 
Charleston has a fine edifice, and is sending out some excellent teachers. The 
Peabody fund has given aid here and there throughout the State to great 
advantage. 

There are, at least, two hundred thousand children in the commonwealth ; 
and it is safe to assert that not more than seventy-five thousand have been 
afforded school facilities. Charleston county shows an attendance of nearly 
8,000 ; in the other coast counties there has latterly been a large decrease in 
attendance. On the sea-islands there are still some schools. An educational 
effort was first made there in 1862, and the school originally established in St. 
Helena is yet in existence, supported by Philadelphia societies. At one time 
there were twenty schools on St. Helena Island alone, supported by Northern 
funds. But now that this aid has been generally withdrawn, education there 
languishes. The school tax of three mills on the dollar would serve very well, if 
the State's, affairs were not so wretchedly confused, and the pay of the teachers 
so uncertain. The corruption in the legislative halls demoralizes even the free 
school system, which the negro once so longed for, as the lever which was to lift 
him up to happiness. Columbia, Beaufort, the mountain towns of consequence, 
and the shire towns of the upland counties, take much interest in the free school 
system, and encourage it as their means will permit. 

The private institutions of learning in Charleston and the State are remark- 
ably excellent. Few cities can boast of better medical colleges than that in 



464 Charleston's charities- — the state's development. 

Charleston. It was first incorporated half a century ago, and had a brilliant 
career until the late war, during which it was nearly ruined. The Roper Hos- 
pital, which adjoins it, is a fine institution. Charleston is divided into health 
districts, over each of which a physician is appointed, with orders to give daily 
attendance upon the poor. This was a much needed charity, since the mortality 
among the negroes who came flocking into the city after the war was fearful, and 
the blacks neglect themselves, unless looked after, until it is too late to heal 
them. 

The burden of charity is by no means small. The alms-house has more 
than sixteen hundred regular " outdoor pensioners," that is, poor residents who 
receive " rations or half-rations," regularly. The city and main hospitals are 
filled with colored patients, who are cheerfully cared for at the city's expense. 
Charleston is jealous of her sanitary reputation, and each successive year that 
passes without bringing the yellow fever only makes her more vigilant in the 
matters of her tidal drainage, her well-ordered markets, her cleanly docks, and 
her careful supervision of the personal health of her citizens. 

Two of the noted institutions of Charleston are a little fallen into decay, but 
are still interesting. The Military Academy, a quaint, mauresque building, has 
become the head-quarters for the United States troops quartered in the city; and 
its splendid school is broken up. The Charleston College is still in operation. It 
was chartered in 1795, and has graduated many distinguished men. The estab- 
lishment of the museum of natural history at the college was first suggested by 
Agassiz in 1850, and it is to-day, although a portion of the collection was 
burned in war-time, one of the finest in the country. The libraries of the pri- 
vate institutions are good, but Charleston greatly needs a public one, such as all 
the Eastern cities possess. 

The development of South Carolina presents an interesting problem for solu- 
tion. It seems, now, as if the system of large plantations were the only one 
under which rice culture can be successfully pursued. Yet the freedmen yearly 
manifest stronger disinclination for work in gangs on other people's land, and 
desire to acquire small farms, and to live independently, however rudely. It is 
singular that some of them have not developed the business capacity requisite to 
establish large plantations of their own, and to influence their fellows to work well 
with them on a cooperative basis.* The wealth in the great pine forests cannot 
be made available until some one besides the negro goes to work in them. The 
sea-island cotton-lands are certainly very unlikely to get the needed recupera- 
tion by much effort on the part of the negro. A new element of immigration 
must be had ; but it will not go to the State in its present political condition. 

Will, then, the State extricate herself from that position ? There seems but 
little hope of any thorough immediate change, perhaps not for four years. 
Cumulative voting has been advocated in the State for some time, and in 1870 
the Attorney- General and Governor Scott professed to be strongly in favor of 
the adoption of that principle. If this plan, as suggested by Mr. Pike in his 

* There is, I am told, one highly prosperous colored settlement on the communal plan in 
Marlborough county. 



THE INCUBUS WHICH CRIPPLES THE STATE. 



465 



excellent book on the subject, or some other method of gaining protection for the 
rights of the minority, could be successfully adopted ; and if Charleston could 
receive her just dues politically, the course of events would, in due time, be 
changed. Her phosphates, her railway connections, her cotton receipts, her 
manufactories cannot fail to make her rich ; but that will not benefit the State, as 
she is at present situated. Very little reliance is to be placed on any hopes of 
immigration, save of families who are well-to-do, toward centres like Aiken and 
Columbia. 

The farmers in the upland regions are forcing their lands too harshly in their 
desperate effort to make a great deal of cotton, and are neglecting the needed 
diversity of crops, so that they will, perhaps, be in distress by and by. There 
are hundreds of superb chances for investment in the State which will never for 
a moment be considered by capitalists so long as a State Government so unjust, 
tyrannical and centralized as the present one maintains itself in office. It is a 
frightful incubus which drags down every earnest man who desires to make an 
effort at a rebound after the collapse caused by the war ; it is a disgrace to 
our system ; it is a stumbling-block to the negro ; an embodied corruption 
which public opinion ought to sweep out of existence ; a usurpation for which 
there is no excuse save the complete ignorance of one race, and the utter help- 
lessness of the other. 




Iron Palmetto in the State -House Yard at Columbia. 



LI 1 1. 

THE LOWLANDS OF NORTH CAROLINA. 

NORTH CAROLINA comprises an area of a little more than 50,000 square 
miles, or 34,000,000 of acres. From the Atlantic ocean it stretches 500 
miles, back to the Tennessee line, and is from 100 to 150 miles wide, between 
Virginia and Georgia. It embraces within its limits almost every variety of soil 
and climate. It is very plainly separated into three natural divisions. The first 
is the " flat country of swamps and marshes and sluggish streams, supposed 
by geologists to have been upheaved by the sea."* This extends 100 miles 
inland from the coast. This is the country of the long-leaved pine, the sandy 
bottoms, and the turpentine forests, inhabited by a low and almost worthless 
population. There, too, however, are flourishing towns and prosperous people. 

The second region is that of wheat, corn, tobacco, and cotton. The soil is 
undulating, fertile, and the rivers afford fine facilities for transportation. The 
third division is that of the mountains. 

There is a marked difference between the upland and lowland people of 
North Carolina. The mountaineers seem, in some measure, a race by them- 
selves, and have sometimes made strong efforts to secure a division of the 
State. To-day there are a few enthusiastic advocates' of the creation of a 
new commonwealth out of the mountain regions of North Carolina and Ten- 
nessee. The mountains have certainly supplied North Carolina with many of 
her famous politicians, with fine instances of prosperity, and with the example 
of loyalty when she sadly needed it. But the residents of the two sections 
know little of each other. The railroads through the mountains will open to the 
lowlanders a Paradise which has been at their very doors, yet little known by 
them. 

The North Carolina coast, as seen from the ocean, is flat and uninteresting. 
There is an aspect of wild desolation about the swamps and marshes which one 
may at first find picturesque, but which finally wearies and annoys the eye. 
But the coast is cut up into a network of navigable sounds, rivers and creeks, 
where the best of fish abound, and where trade may some day flow in. The 
shad and herring fisheries in these inlets are already sources of much profit. 
The future export of pine and cypress timber, taken from the mighty forests, 
will yield an immense revenue. The swampy or dry tracts along the coast are 
all capable of producing a bale of cotton to the acre. They give the most 
astonishing returns for the culture of the sweet potato, the classic peanut, or 

*From a published letter from Rev. Dr. Mason, rector of Christ's Church, Raleigh, North 
Carolina. 



THE NORTH CAROLINA COAST — BEAUFORT. 467 

"guber," the grape, and many kinds of vegetables. Malarial fevers will, of 
course, seize on the inhabitant of this region who does not pay proper atten- 
tion to the drainage all about him. It is believed that along this coast great 
numbers of vineyards will in time be established, for there are unrivaled advan- 
tages for wine- growing. 

The extreme eastern limit of the State is a narrow strip of land, separating 
the ocean from the interior waters. It is called the Banks, and is here and there 
broken by inlets, the most important of which are Hatteras, Ocracoke, Beaufort, 
and the mouth of the Cape Fear river. On this narrow strip, which the ocean 
has with great unwillingness conceded the State, lives a singular race, " half- 
horse, half-alligator," subsisting by fishing and pilotage. The central point of 
this projecting and protecting arm of land is the far and ill-famed Hatteras, the 
terror of the voyager along the stormy coast. 

"Currituck Sound," one of the notable features of the lowlands of North Caro- 
lina, separates the " Banks " from the main land just south of the Virginia line. 
It is a fresh-water strait, varying in width from three to fifteen miles, and in 
winter is a sportsman's heaven. Myriads of wild ducks, geese and swans resort 
there during the cold months, and amateurs from every climate under heaven 
visit the marshes and slaughter the fowls for months together. Albemarle 
and Croatan sounds are also notable fishing resorts ; through Croatan one enters 
into Pamlico, and thence penetrates to Beaufort Inlet, on which the town of 
Beaufort stands. 

Beaufort possesses one of the best harbors on the Atlantic coast. Vessels can 
come directly from the deep sea to the wharves of the Atlantic and North Caro- 
lina Railway Company at Morehead City, opposite Beaufort. The town has 
relapsed into comparative obscurity since its brilliant war history, when it was 
the rendezvous of many navies, and the point of departure for many hostile 
expeditions. Fort Macon, at the entrance of its harbor, and its surroundings, 
are interesting, and there are throngs of summer visitors along the ample beach. 
The railroad, connecting Beaufort with the interior of the State, runs north- 
westward through Newbern to Goldsboro. The former is an old and pleasant 
town of five or six thousand inhabitants, at the confluence of the Neuse and 
Trent rivers, and the latter is a newer and smarter place, owing its growth mainly 
to the increase of railroad facilities. Newbern boasts a line of steamers to New 
York, and once had many elegant mansions and gardens, most of which have 
latterly fallen into decay. 

North Carolina is very well supplied with railways in her lowland and middle 
districts. The North Carolina road extends from Goldsboro to Charlotte ; the 
Raleigh and Gaston road, from Raleigh to Weldon, thence giving an outlet 
through Virginia ; the Western road from Fayetteville, on the Cape Fear river 
mountainward (probably before many years to be completed) ; the Wilmington 
and Weldon road runs directly north and south through the State; and the Chat- 
ham railroad penetrates from Raleigh to the coal and iron-beds in Chatham 
county. The Air Line road from Atlanta gives a direct route from Charlotte in 
North Carolina, to Danville in Virginia, and thence north and east. 



468 THE STATE SINCE THE WAR. 

The lower regions of the State abound in beautiful though quiet rural scenery. 
There are no towns of considerable size. Raleigh is a sleepy, delightful, shaded 
old place. Wilmington, although busy, is not large; Charlotte is small but lively. 
Salisbury and Greensboro are in the centre of a rich mining region, where 
copper, iron, coal, and gold are to be found ; the former is the centre of a lively 
tobacco trade, and the latter is the point whence one takes the railroad to States- 
ville and Morganton, the charming towns at the outer line of the mountain 
region. Salisbury was the seat of a famous Confederate prison in which many 
a Union soldier languished and died, or starved through weary months. 

The North Carolinians are accustomed now-a-days to wonder why immi- 
grants do not rush into their State, and settle upon the lands which can be had 
so cheaply ; and finding that but few come, and that the State is in a general 
condition of discouragement and decay, financially, they have relapsed into an 
indolent attitude, and let progress drift by them. In some of the small towns I 
found the people more inclined to bitterness and less reconciled to the results 
of the war than anywhere else in the South. Many towns, too, had a deserted 
and neglected look which was painful. 

The State, of course, suffered greatly by the war. It was one of the fore- 
most of pro-slavery communities; held nearly 350,000 slaves when the war 
broke out ; and had a firmly-seated and exclusive aristocracy, which has natu- 
rally been very much broken up by recent events. The present population is 
1,071,361, of whom 678,470 are blacks, of by no means the highest type. 
The revolution decreased the value of real and personal estate in North 
Carolina from $292,297,602, in i860 to $132,046,391 in 1870, and the decrease 
within the last four years has been very rapid. 

The evils of universal suffrage have been very great in this State. The great 
mass of densely ignorant and ambitious blacks suddenly hurled upon the field 
created the wildest confusion, and crushed the commonwealth under irredeema- 
ble debt. The villainy and robbery to which the white population of the State 
was compelled to submit, at the hands of the plunderers maintained in power by 
the negro, did much to destroy all possibility of a speedy reconciliation between 
the two races. Still, the citizens are loyal to the Union, and are anxious to be on 
friendly terms with the North ; yet continue to regard Northerners as in some 
way the authors of the evils which have befallen them. They do not, however, 
reproach the North with having sent them a carpet-bagger ; as the man who did 
them most harm, and whose conduct has been most sharply criticised, was a 
citizen of their own State. 

The reconstruction convention in 1868 was a singular gathering. Its pro- 
ceedings bordered on the ridiculous. It finally secured a Constitution which 
has since been much amended. The judges and other officers placed in power 
were notoriously incompetent ; and Mr. Holden, who was appointed first pro- 
visional Governor of the State under reconstruction, was the author of so much 
questionable work that he was successfully impeached and removed. There was, 
at one time, imminent danger of civil war in the State ; several counties were 
in insurrection ; the Ku-Klux flourished and committed all kinds of infamous 



GOV. HOLDEN'S CAREER — RALEIGH — THE CAPITOL. 469 

outrages. Holden was an original secessionist, and his newspaper, the Standard, 
printed at Raleigh, was the mouth-piece of the Democracy until 1 860, when this 
unblushing " scallawag," as the Southerners call political renegades, threw his 
Democratic sentiments out at window, and went in for the Union cause. Of 
course he did this with an eye to future plunder. Mr. Holden was, in 1873, 
Postmaster at the State Capitol, and seemed but little affected by his forcible 
removal from the executive chair. 

At the close of the wild carnival of robbery and maladministration which 
marked the career of the first reconstruction government, North Carolina found 
that her debts were between $36,000,000 and $40,000,000. This was an appal- 
ling exhibit, for the mere payment of the interest was enough to stagger the 
impoverished and struggling agriculturists. The money had gone, alas ! none 
•save the thieves knew where. The plundered people only knew that out of 
$16,000,000 voted by the Legislatures for "public works of improvements," but 
$500,000 had ever been devoted to that purpose ; and the ignorant negro himself 
was puzzled to discover what had become of the resources which, at the outset 
of his political career, he had imagined to be unfailing. 

The main villainies had been consummated at a time when the mass of the 
white natives who took part in the war were excluded from office, and when the 
negro vote was overwhelming. As soon as Governor Holden was impeached, 
the white population succeeded in gaining a fair share of influence again, and 
when he was removed they came into power, Governor Caldwell, Holden's suc- 
cessor, working pretty harmoniously with them. The political troubles may now 
be considered as nearly over, and if the industrial opportunities of the State are 
improved, there will be a return to some degree of prosperity. Many of the 
most influential citizens believe that an attitude of perfect frankness on the part 
of North Carolina toward its creditors will be the only thing that can save 
the State. They are anxious to see a compromise effected as speedily as pos- 
sible, that both white and black may know just how they are situated, and may 
set their shoulders to the wheel in earnest.* 

The State- House at Raleigh is delightfully situated in the midst of lovely 
foliage, and its massive granite columns and superb dome, modeled after the 
Parthenon, are very imposing. Raleigh once boasted an exquisite statue of 
Washington, from the master hand of Canova ; but it was destroyed with the 
first State-House in the disastrous fire in 183 1. The town, which was named for 
Sir Walter Raleigh, and was established as the seat of government in 1788, is 
built around a ten-acre lot called Union square, in the centre of which the State- 
House stands. It would not be an excess of generous remembrance on the part 
of the North Carolinians to erect in their capital a statue of the illustrious Essex, 
who did so much three hundred years ago to further the colonization of 
the region now within the State's limits. At. Raleigh there is a large and 
well-filled Penitentiary, and the Deaf and Dumb and Lunatic Asylums are 
situated in the outskirts. The town has only 8,000 inhabitants, half of whom 
are negroes. 

* This chapter was written in the summer of 1874. 



470 SHOCKING ILLITERACY IN NORTH CAROLINA. 

Northward from Raleigh, toward Charlotte, lie many fertile counties, filled 
with the remnants of once famous plantations, and with small farms, even now 
prosperous. At Chapel Hill the State University, now much fallen into decay, 
'is located ; and at Hillsborough, one of the oldest towns in the State, the visitor 
is still shown the house once occupied by Lord Cornwallis, and is reminded 
that Governor Tryon had his home there ; that there the provincial Congress 
and the Legislature of North Carolina first assembled, and there, too, many 
unhappy " Regulators " were executed. 

The State certainly needs to make progress in education, for the illiteracy at 
present within its borders is shocking. One of the United States Senators gave 
it me his belief that there were as many as 350,000 persons in North Carolina 
who could neither read nor write. The State Superintendent of Instruction said 
that, late in 1873, there were only 150,000 out of the 350,000 pupil-children, 
actually at school. The free school system, he thought, up to that date, could 
by no means be called a thorough success ; coming, as it did, directly after the 
war, when people were striving to save money with which to replace their lost 
stock and farming implements, the dollar tax demanded for the schools was 
odious to the masses. Still, from $250,000 to $400,000 is annually collected 
for school purposes ; while before the war there was no system worthy the name. 
The same provision is made for whites and blacks ; there is not much desire on 
the part of ex- Confederates there to deprive the negro of the advantages of an 
education, as they now realize that it helps him to become a better laborer. 
There are 40,000 colored children now in the free schools of the State; 530 
black teachers passed the Board of Examiners in 1873, and these teachers were 
paid $46,000 per year. There are several small colleges, each having five or 
six score students. Prominent among them are Trinity, at Hyde Point 
(Methodist), Davidson, at old Mecklenburg, where the State first publicly 
renounced her allegiance to the British crown (Presbyterian), and the Wake 
Forest (Baptist) College, near Raleigh. 

The school law of the State requires that public free schools shall be main- 
tained "four months every year in every school district in each county of the 
State in which the qualified voters shall vote to levy the additional school-tax 
for that purpose." This, of course, gives people an opportunity to reject the 
system entirely, but there are few counties so rude as to refuse all educational 
facilities, although nearly all the people in the back-country have a most unac- 
countable aversion to paying "school-taxes." If the Legislature would inaugurate 
a system which would bring the people up to its level, as was done in Virginia, a 
reform might be readily effected. Wilmington has at last made the free schools 
which have long existed in its midst city institutions, and it is hoped that this 
good example will be followed by a like movement in all the large towns. 
Raleigh, strange to say, is hindered from taxing itself to support a system of 
graded schools by the State law, which is very crotchety, and needs amend- 
ment. The Peabody fund distributes $12,000 to $13,000 annually in the 
State, supporting some two score thriving schools. At Newbern and Wash- 
ington the citizens have shown considerable spirit in establishing free schools. 



WILMINGTON — THE CAPE FEAR RIVER. 471 

The capital receives .35,000 or 40,000 bales of cotton yearly, but the great 
bulk of the State's crop goes by rail to Wilmington. Edgecombe, Caswell, 
Rockingham, Stokes, and Warner are the great cotton counties, the former grow- 
ing 18,361 bales in 1872. The cotton production of the State varies from 
100,000 to 150,000 bales annually. 

The range of climate covered by the State may be taught by the statement 
that buckwheat can be grown on the mountains in Ashe county, and oranges 
nourish in the soft, sweet air of Wilmington. There is a tropical luxuriance of 
flowers and trees in Wilmington, which is almost astonishing, for one sees all 
plants possible at Charleston or Savannah nourishing in the gardens of this more 
northern town. Wilmington lies on the banks of the Cape Fear river, and on 
the hills which extend backward from those banks. It is but twenty-eight miles 
from the mouth of the river, and was one of the havens most sought after by 
blockade-runners during our civil war. At the mouth of the river stand Forts 
Fisher and Caswell, the former one of the strongest forts on the Atlantic coast, 
as it proved itself in 'the terrible days of 1865, when Porter and Terry knocked 
at its doors and finally burst them open. 

Wilmington has important railway connections, notably the Wilmington, 
Rutherford, and- Charlotte road, which will give the port direct communication 
with Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois, and will immensely increase her 
trade. All the counties through which the road, when completed, will pass, are 
rich in mineral and agricultural resources. The other routes leading to Charles- 
ton and Richmond also command a considerable trade. 

The Cape Fear river, at Wilmington, is a wide and noble stream, and the 
scene along its banks, in the brilliant sunshine of the autumn morning when I 
saw it, was inspiring. Cheerful gangs of negroes were rowing huge scows from 
side to side of the stream, standing upright and steering by means of long poles 
or sweeps ; one might have fancied them a species of African gondoliers. Swedish 
ships were loading with naval stores ; huge piles of lumber, and heaps and long 
rows of barrels of turpentine, and pitch and rosin, were ranged on the wharves. 
There were great numbers of negroes who looked idle, although many were 
employed. Some were fishing, others slept in corners; one or two groups 
seemed discussing politics, and in the centre of a crowd of jet black men I 
heard the following question and answer, isolated fragments of a deep religious 
discussion : 

"Wha's de reason dar 's so many degrees (sects) o' Baptis' now, when dar 
wa'n't on'y one John de Baptis', hey ? " 

" Lor, nigger, we ain't 'sponsible fur dat ; dat a'nt got nuffin to do wid godli- 
ness ! " 

Front street is a fine avenue, lined with many elegant blocks devoted to 
business. Market street is a broad, central promenade, crowded with the omni- 
present negroes, who chatter and " discuss " all day long. The blacks seem to 
fancy that labor is incompatible with the enjoyment of a city life. 

In that portion of the town devoted to the residences, churches, and public 
buildings, perfect tranquillity prevails. Nowhere is there hum of wheels, clatter 



472 



THE COMMERCE OF WILMINGTON. 



of teams, or braying of whistles. On Third and Fifth streets there are many 
elegant mansions, and gardens filled with rarest tropical and costly plants. The 
City and Thalian halls, the jail, and one or two of the churches are quite impos- 
ing, but the city is not rich in architecture. The cemeteries are pretty sylvan 
retreats, and the sleepy moss-grown suburb of " Hilton " is a favorite resort for 
excursions. 

Commercially, Wilmington has every reason to hope for great development. 
The principal articles of export are spirits of turpentine in barrels, crude turpen- 
tine, rosin, tar, pitch, cotton, peanuts, and lumber in all shapes.* The foreign 
trade is mainly with Liverpool, Oueenstown, Antwerp, Belfast, London, Car- 
denas, Rotterdam, Havana, Bristol, Hamburg, Cape Haytien, Demerara, Jamaica, 
Nassau and Hayti. The steamship lines running to Philadelphia, Baltimore and 
New York, have an aggregate tonnage of 40,000 tons monthly. In 1872, 
22,000,000 feet of lumber were shipped from the port. After the war, the 
exports of spirits of turpentine and rosin were encouraging until 1870; since 
then their development has not been so great, but the constant growth of the 
cotton trade makes amends for their failure. The fine regions extending along 
the road to Weldon, and on both sides of the Wilmington, Columbia and 
Augusta railroad, as well as on the new Rutherford route, are very rich in tur- 
pentine and timber. The section traversed by the two Cape Fears and the 

* Comparative statement of exports, coastwise and foreign, from Wilmington, North 
Carolina, from January 1, i860, to December 31, 1870: 



Articles. 


Coastwise. 


Foreign. 


i860. 


1870. 


i860. 


1870. 


Spirits Turpentine, bbls . . 

| Crude Turpentine, bbls . 

Rosin, bbls 


127,562 

52,175 
440,132 

43,056 

5,489 

22,851 

1,561 

1,750 

99,743 

9,126,176 

22,600 

730,880 

94,723 


68,966 

12,929 

483,546 

54^9° 

4,624 

51,617 

72 

547 

124,296 

11,515,123 

290,789 

4,804,890 

482,253 


20,400 

23,548 

57,425 

6,120 

784 

9,882,078 

20,000 

2,887,870 

I0,000 


32,889 

3,258 

26,127 

6,107 

190 

20 

8,378,861 
85,400 

2,339,334 


Tar, bbls 

Pitch, bbls 

Cotton, bales 

Cotton Yarn, bales 

Cotton Sheeting, bales. . . 

Peanuts, bushels 

Lumber, P. P., feet 

Timber, P. P., feet 

Shingles 

Staves, Cypress 

Staves, Oak 



It will be seen by the above that the export of naval stores, both coastwise and foreign, 
except in one instance, has fallen off greatly during the past decade, while, on the contrary, 
there has been a heavy increase, say about 120 per cent., in the shipments of cotton. This is 
due, mainly, to the fact that latterly, and in the country supplying the city, every interest was 
made subservient to the culture of cotton. Even the production of turpentine was of secondary 
importance compared with the zeal with which cotton was planted, so that Wilmington, the 
greatest naval store depot in the world, only exported coastwise one and one-third barrels of 
spirits turpentine to the bale of cotton ; that is to say, the number of bales of cotton exported 
was seventy-five per cent, of the number of barrels of spirits turpentine. 



FAYETTEVILLE CHARLOTTE. 473 

South and Black rivers are, perhaps, richer in turpentine stores than any other in 
the world. A new railway line on the lowlands of the coast, and terminating 
at Wilmington, is contemplated. 

The little city has a valuation of only $7,000,000, a debt of $600,000, an 
excellent city government, and many enterprising merchants. There is still 
some bitterness among those of the aristocrats who were ruined by the war, but 
it is rapidly mellowing into a regret which has but little of unkindly feeling 
toward the North mingled in it. A determination on their part to make Wil- 
mington all that it has opportunities to be, would soon increase its population 
from 14,000 to many times that number. 

Fayetteville and Charlotte are the sites of prosperous cotton factories. The 
water power of the former place has never been utilized ; and it is astonishing 
that it is not taken advantage of. Fayetteville is connected by rail with the 
mining region in Chatham and Moore counties, and is on the line of one of the 
important routes to the South, via Columbia and Augusta. Charlotte bids fair 
to become a prominent centre for manufacturing interests, on account of its rail- 
road facilities and fine water power. Its historic importance, as the place where 
the first American Declaration of Independence was made in 1775, by the 
patriots of Mecklenburg county, assembled in convention, cannot be denied. 
The British troops occupied Charlotte in 1780; and there it was that General 
Greene took command of the Southern army, after the departure of Cornwallis. 
The United States Government has an assay office at Charlotte, and gold mining 
is from time to time carried on in the adjacent counties. The town also boasts 
a military institute, and a prosperous seminary for young ladies. 




A Wayside Sketch. 



LIV. 



AMONG THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS — JOURNEY FROM EASTERN 
TENNESSEE TO WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA. 



a\/ r OU ain't a show, be ye?" said the small boy. 

I The question was pardonable ; the travelers alighting, that rainy June 
evening, from their weary and mud-bespattered horses at the door of a little 
tavern in a Tennessee mountain town, and proceeding to unload their baggage- 
wagon, certainly presented a singular spectacle. Such mysterious array of traps 
the small boy's round, wondering eyes had never seen before. He controlled his 

curiosity until a tin case containing 
artists' materials was produced, when he 
gave a prolonged whistle, and forthwith 
proceeded to inquire our qualities. 
Visions of magic lanterns and traveling 
mountebanks danced before his eyes ; 
his heated imagination hinted at even 
the possibility of play-actors. 

Two days of swift railway travel had 
brought me from St. Louis to join a 
merry party of excursionists through 
the noblest mountain ranges of the 
South. We had come from Morris- 
town, in Eastern Tennessee, and at the 
end of our first day's journey on horse- 
back, crawled, drenched and fatigued, 
into a hamlet for shelter. Let me show 
you the party as it then appeared. 

First alighted the Colonel, coming 
down with a solid thump in the sticky 
mud, and unbuckling from his saddle 
"The femaii Boy.- capacious bags and rolls of blankets ; 

then taking from the wagon certain mysterious packages, he propounded the 
inquiry which is of such thrilling interest to mountain travelers after nightfall : 
" Can we get to stay here to-night ?" 
" Reckon we can accommodate ye." 

Next descended the Judge, his long, gray beard and Arabian mustache 
streaming with rain, his garments bedraggled, and his eyes dim with the sky- 
spray. He, likewise going to the wagon, took from it seductive, valises, boxes 




AMONG THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS. 475 

which gave forth a cheering rattle of apparatus, and cans of various patterns, and 
hastened to shelter. A new accession of small boys silently viewed these pro- 
ceedings with awe. 

But ah ! the next figure which galloped lustily to the door, mounted on a 
prancing, delicate Kentucky mare ! How did the juvenile by-standers gape at 
that short, alert youth, with spectacles on nose, and riding- whip swung cavalierly 
in hand ; with white Marseilles trowsers mottled and drenched with mud and 
water ; with jaunty gray hat, flabby and drooping ; with overcoat tied about his 
neck, and a collection of minerals knotted in his handkerchief at his saddle-bow. 
He was no common traveler. It must — it must be a show ! 

Or he with camp stool and dripping umbrella slung on his shoulders, with 
broad slouch hat crushed down over his eyes, and a variegated panorama of 
the road along which he had passed painted by the weather upon his back — the 
artist, whose hands were filled with the mystic tin box ; behold him ! the envied 
cynosure of boyish eyes. 

Then the writer, — clambering down from his horse's smoking sides, and 
hastening to join the others before the crackling and leaping flame in an old- 
fashioned fire-place, overhearing as he entered, however, a new come boy's wild 
guess : 

" If 't ain't a show, it 's 'rock-hunters,' /reckon." 

What mattered rain and mud, the ferrying of swollen streams, the breaking 
down of wagons, and the weary climbing of hills ? The prospect before us was 
none the less inspiring. We were about to enter upon that vast elevated region 
which forms the southern division of the Appalachian mountain system, and 
constitutes the culminating point in the Atlantic barrier of the American con- 
tinent. We stood at the gate of the lands through which runs the chain of the 
Iron, Smoky, and Unaka mountains, separating North Carolina from Eastern 
Tennessee. 

Beyond the blue line of hills faintly discerned in the rainy twilight from the 
windows of our little room lay the grand table-land, 2,000 feet above the heated 
air of cities and the contagion of civilization ; and there a score of mountain 
peaks reached up 6,000 feet into the crystal atmosphere ; torrents ran impetuously 
down their steep sides into noble valleys ; there was the solitude of the canon, the 
charm of the dizzy climb along the precipice-brink, the shade of the forests 
where no woodman's axe had yet profaned the thickets. It was a region 
compared to which the White mountains seemed dwarfed and insignificant, for 
through an extent of more than 150 miles, height after height towered in solemn 
magnificence, and the very valleys were higher up than the gaps in the White 
mountain range ! Through the thick rain-veil, during our first day's wandering, 
we had seen the noble outlines of English mountain, and the distant and rugged 
sides of the Smoky ; had passed over hill- sides covered with corn, where the 
white tree-trunks in the "deadenings" stood like spectres protesting against 
sacrilege ; along banks of streams overhung with dense and richly-colored foliage, 
and past log farm-houses, where tall, gaunt farmers, clad in homespun, were 
patiently waiting for the rain to cease — until we came to the " Mouth of 



476 



FROM 



NOLICHUCKY 



TO PIGEON RIVER, 



Chucky," as the ford just above the junction of the Nolichucky and French 
Broad rivers is called. 

Time was when all the country bordering the rivers at their junction was 
romantic ground. The "great Indian war trail," upon which so many scenes 
of violence and murder were enacted, ran not far from the banks of the No- 
lichucky, and the war-ford " upon the French Broad " was but a short distance 
from Clifton, where we had halted for the night. From the time of the settlement 
along the banks of the two rivers, one hundred years ago, until early in the 
present century, the settler took his life in his hands daily, and the war-cry 
of the Indian was a familiar sound to his ears. 

The Nolichucky, at the ford, ran rapidly between great mountain banks, 
whose sides were so steep as to be inaccessible on foot, and just below gave 
itself to the racing and roaring rapids of the "French Broad," which seemed 
angry at being pent up among the cliffs. A long halloo brought the ferry- 
man with his flat-boat from the opposite bank; the clumsy ark drifting us 
safely over to the stretch of winding road which finally led us through a still 
old town, hidden and moldering at the base of a hill, whence we followed 
along picturesque paths until we reached the placid Pigeon river, with the 
mountains near it mirrored in its bosom, and, crossing it, dismounted at Clif- 
ton, to be confronted by the small boy with the abnormal appetite for 
" shows." 

The rain ceased when we were safely housed ; and having placed our 
drenched garments by the fire to dry, we waited for the supper of bacon and 

biscuits, flanked by molasses-syrup and 
the blackest of coffee, meanwhile catch- 
ing a glimpse of the prosperous little 
town set down in a nook in the mount- 
ains, with a single railroad line, run- 
ning directly through the main street, 
giving it a hold on the outer world. 
The river was fringed with trees and 
overhanging vines and creepers ; in 
every direction was the blue stretch 
of far-away hills, or the shadow of lux- 
uriant woods. Our lullaby that night 
was the murmur of the river and the 
cry of the whip-poor-will. Before dawn 
we were astir, and while the dwellers 
in cities were still asleep our little caval- 
cade was vigorously en route for the 
• North Carolina line. 
Ahead, caracoling merrily from side to side of the highway on his coquet- 
tishly-pacing mare " Cricket," whose very motions were poetry, rode Jonas of 
the blond locks, our German companion, in his saddle graceful as a Centaur, 
in his motions alert as a cat, for he had ridden to many a battle in the cav- 




"The Judge." [Page 473.] 



A MOUNTAIN PANORAMA — A TENNESSEE CABIN. 477 

airy of Prussian William's victorious army. There was a dash of the trooper 
in him still — the erect military port, the joyous outburst into song, now 
roystering, now tender; the enviable familiarity with all the secrets of road 
and woodland life, and a calm, aesthetic sense, never disturbed by weather 
or the rude inconvenience of travel. 

Our route that morning lay through the forest, along unused road- ways; and, 
constantly ascending, we caught from time to time exquisite views of the sum- 
mits of English, the Smoky, and other mountains. Great mists were moving 
lightly away ; now and then some monarch of the ranges had his lofty brow 
wrapped in the delicate embrace of white clouds, which spread into fantastic 
shapes of smoke-wreaths and castles and towers, sometimes even seeming to 
take the contour of the mountains themselves. 

Now we came to a log-house, with sloping roof, set on some shelf of a hill- 
side, whence one could look down into deep valleys, and around whose doors 
sheep and goats were huddled, lying in the shelter of the fences until the sun 
came out. A shepherd dog would bark at us ; a tall maiden, clad in the blue or 
greenish homespun of the region, would tell us which road to take, and how to 
turn and " foller the creek," and so we wandered on. Sometimes the hill-sides 
were so steep that we preferred to dismount and lead our horses rather than take 
the risk of being pitched over their heads. Rapid little streams here and there 
foamed across the roadways, and hid themselves in the forests. 

Beneath a great oak, or wide-spreading willow, we found a cool spring with a 
gourd upon a board above it, and travelers halting for shade and rest, with whom 
our party would exchange courtesies and interrogatories. Still we went on 
climbing up and up — nearer to some of the peaks, and within view of the clear- 
ings upon their sides, and the bald patches where the rocks stood out in the 
light. 

By and by, at a lonely log-house, on a beautiful mountain side, whence one 
could see the hills craning their long necks in every direction, we halted for din- 
ner ; but before we had hitched our horses there came a sudden blinding storm 
of wind and rain, in the midst of which we hurriedly gave the animals over to our 
impervious mulatto wagon-driver, and with the lunch baskets beat a retreat for 
the cabin porch. 

The typical Tennessee woman of the mountains, tall and thin, but kind and 
graceful, the mother of ten children, who stood ranged around her in inquiring 
attitude, welcomed us, and a loaf of hot corn-bread soon smoked upon the table. 
Very humble and simple were the appointments of this cabin home. The bare 
floor, however, was extremely clean ; the spinning-wheel, with the flax hanging 
to it, stood in a corner of the porch ; in the great kitchen in the rear of the cabin 
was a fire-place, in the ashes of which another corn-cake was baking, and the 
good woman offered us wild honey, buttermilk, and the berries of the mountains. 

" No man-folks nigh home now," she said. "Air you rock-huntin' ? " 

Assuring her that we were not looking for minerals, she questioned us no far- 
ther, and seemed to be puzzled when the Colonel hinted that we were in "search 
of information." * 

3i 



47§ MISTAKEN FOR REVENUE OFFICERS. 

Once more the rain- cloud lifted and the skies were clear. Andy hitched up, 
singing a cheerful melody, and we rode on; now through gaps in the chain of 
hills where level fields were in cultivation, and where the women were at work 
side by side with the men hoeing corn ; now by the banks of some creek which 
rippled merrily over a pebbly bottom, and was overhung by short, densely-set 
willows; until, at last, we came into a valley where there were a few scattered 
frame houses and a little mill, around which were gathered some twenty mount- 
aineers. Here our over-loaded wagon suddenly broke down, directly opposite 
a cabin, in which, through the interstices, we could see anvil, bellows, and other 
appurtenances of the blacksmith's trade. 

The afternoon was waning, and the punctual Judge had planned that we 
should spend that night in North Carolina. But before us lay a tremendous 
height, whose rugged sides seemed interminable. Riding on in haste to find the 
blacksmith, we were suddenly surrounded by a threatening mob of half-drunken 
mountain men clad in rude garb, some mounted, some on foot, but not one of 
them with a friendly look. Our inquiry for help, as Jonas and the writer backed 
their horses rapidly, was met with an oath, and a peremptory demand why we 
were " racketing about the country." 

This not being answered in the most satisfactory manner, demonstrations of 
violence were made, and it dawned upon the advance guard of the wagon that 
perhaps a retreat would be prudent. There were bad and drunken faces among 
the rough, men ; two or three hands were clutching stones plucked from the wet 
roads, while the circle gradually narrowed in toward us. So galloping back, we 
reported "breakers ahead." Patching up the wagon we all moved forward 
together ; but upon our approach to the mill the threatening attitude of the 
mountaineers was resumed, the motley crowd falling in behind when we had 
passed, and seeming to await some signal. Presently the Colonel and the Judge 
were assailed with questions like this from the pursuing group : " Reckon ye 
don't want to steal nothin', do ye?" This being succeeded by more pointed 
remarks. 

At last hostilities became so imminent that we were forced to stop and 
explain. Gathering around the wagon, we answered the inquiries, " Whar 
be ye from?" "What do ye want yer?" "What mout your name be?" 
etc., and b)^ much parleying demonstrated that we meant no harm. Finally 
man by man dropped off, but, much to our discomfort, two or three of the more 
drunk and uproarious followed us toward the ford at the base of the mountain 
in a manner which plainly indicated attack. 

We were now entering upon a wild and lonely by-road, and even the here- 
tofore incredulous of our party had suspicions of mischief afoot. The ascent, 
wooded and sombre, was before us. 

At this juncture another man approached, and said he would walk with us to 
the mountain top. He was sober, and, producing from his pocket a flask of 
"moonshine" whiskey, invited us to drink. The secret was out. We had evi- 
dently been mistaken for a. party of revenue officers, on a mission to seize some 
of the concealed stills in the gorges and caves of this wild region. 



CHESTNUT MOUNTAIN PARSON CATON'S. 



479 



We drank of the blistering - fluid, and presently, to our great relief, the 
drunken horsemen behind reluctantly retired. After consulting vaguely together 
for a little time in the road, they disappeared, our companion assuring us that 
they would do us no harm. " But ye can't always tell," he added. " A man 
wants to keep his eye out in these regions when the boys 've ben drinkin'. " 

The ascent of the Chestnut mountain now became tedious and painful. The 
road ran zigzag along the edges of banks and rocks, and over our heads hung 
mammoth embankments, which might have crushed a caravan. But how deli- 
cious the sunlight on the tree-stems, through the forest glades ; how delicate the 
green mosses clothing the trunks of fallen monarchs ; how crystal and sweet the 
water which we drank from the foamy brooks ! 

For miles we clambered along this lofty road until night was at hand. Our 
companion, who paused from time to time to treat himself from the bottle, and 
to importune us to drink, finally left us at a cross-road, advising us to stay at 
Parson Caton's. We could get to stay with the parson — he kept folks ; would 
we have some more "moonshine?" No? Good luck to us. So we hurried on 
to Parson Caton's. 

A by-road, leading into a thicket where wild vines grew luxuriantly ; steep 
descents and lofty knolls, crowned with strong tree-stems ; a woodland path ; 
then a clearing, and we were at the humble cabin of the parson. 




The Judge shows the Artist's Sketch-Book. 



LV. 

ACROSS THE "SMOKY" TO WAYNESVILLE — THE MASTER CHAIN 

OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 

ON our way up the mountain we had passed " the church." It was a rude 
structure of boards and logs, which we should have mistaken for some 
deserted shanty, had not our friend of the "moonshine" whiskey pointed it out. 

The parson's cabin stood in an enclosure, guarded by a rough fence, and, as 
we approached, a stalwart young fellow opened the little gate, and some hounds 
followed him out, making the woods ring with their yelping. A tall matron and 
two of " the girls " — young women, at least five and a-half feet high, dressed 
in straight, homespun gowns — peered out at us, and we were presently invited 
to remain at the cabin all night, as " the parson never refuses nobody." 

The pigs and the geese had just come home together from their day's ramble 
in the woods, and were quarreling over the trough which ran along the fence. 
The cows wandered about the clearing, watched by the hounds; and the "boys" 
busied themselves in hewing logs of wood into sticks for the fire. Behind the cabin 
rose a rib of the mountain, on which was a corn-field, and near this ran a brook. 

The whole cabin did not seem large enough to house a family of four ; yet 
Parson Caton's stalwart brood of ten children lived there happily with himself 
and wife, and found the shelter ample. There were but two rooms on the lower 
floor, each lighted by the doors only ; above was a loft, in which were laid 
truckle-beds. Supper was speedily cooking on the coals in the fire-place ; the 
scent of bacon was omnipresent. In the smaller of the two rooms there were four 
large beds, covered with gay quilts, and shoved closely together. Around the 
room hung collections of herbs and. several rifles; for furniture there were a few 
rude chairs, and a small table, on which were some antiquated books. 

As we returned from a wash at the brook the parson came home, and was 
greeted with a cheery welcome from the hounds. Every inch of his face was 
filled with rugged lines, which told of strong character. He stood leaning on his 
staff and looking us over intently for some moments before he said, " Good 
evening, men." Then he greeted us heartily, and our invalid wagon was forth- 
with dispatched to the rustic forge near the cabin for repairs. There Andy held 
a pine knot, while the parson's son, a stout smith, worked. 

This old man, in his mountain home, was as simple and courteous in his 
demeanor as any citizen. After the frugal supper was over, he asked us many 
questions of the outer world, which he had never visited ; New York and Louis- 
ville seemed to him like dreams. By and by the family came crowding in to 
evening prayers. It was quite dark, and the forest around us was still. 



A TENNESSEE PARSON'S HOME. 



48I 



The parson took down a well-worn Bible, and opening it at the Psalms, read, 
in a loud voice, and with occasional quaint expoundings, one or two selections ; 
after which, taking up a hymn-book, he read a hymn, and the family sang line by 
line as he gave them out. They sung iri quavering, high-pitched voices, to the 
same tunes which were heard in the Tennessee mountains when Nolichucky was 
an infant settlement, and the banks of the French Broad were crimsoned with the 
blood of white settlers, shed by the Indians. 

The echoes of the hymn died away into the depths of the forest, and were 
succeeded by a prayer of earnestness and fervor, marked here and there by 
strong phrases of dialect, but one which made our little company bow their heads, 
for the parson prayed for us and for our journey, and brought the prayer home 




"The family sang line by line." 

to us. Another hymn was lined, during which the hounds now and then joined 
in with their musical howls, and at last the family withdrew, leaving us in the 
spare-room. Presently, however, the parson reappeared, and announced that he 
and his wife would share the room with us, which they did ; and we were 
wakened to the six o'clock breakfast by the good woman, who joined with her 
husband in reproving us for continuing our journey on the Sabbath day. 

As we started once more, the wagon, carefully mended overnight, broke 
down again ! So then the parson stripped a hickory bough with his own hands, 
and bound together the pieces. A mile farther on, coming to another forge, we 
halted until a second smith tried his hand at a permanent mending, although he 
said he " mout get fined by the authorities for working on a Sunday." The 



482 



ENTERING THE. NORTH- CAROLINA MOUNTAINS. 




Judge amused the smith's children with the artist's sketch-book, while the ham- 
mer rang on the anvil. 

The country here and henceforward was of the wildest and most romantic 
character. The mountaineers, scattered sparsely along the ridges, cultivated the 

land in corn, of which there were huge fields 
visible in the clearings, but sent nothing to 
market in winter, and, while the crops were 
growing, were idle. The houses were almost 
invariably of logs. Often, as in Switzerland, 
looking down a high bank, we could see the 
tree -tops in a long valley below us, and the 
cabin of some farmer, with his cob -house 
granary and little cattle-pen nestling by a 
creek. Here, by the hard, firm roadways, the 
mountain laurel, the ginseng and the gentian 
abounded, and pines and spruces, poplars, 
hickories, walnuts, oaks, and ash grew in the 
valleys and along the banks. 

We were now climbing over the hills of the 
Great Smoky range, making our way toward 
the elevated gap, through which we were to 
enter North Carolina. Every turn in the 
angular highway brought a new vista of 
mountains, blue and infinite, behind us ; now 
in serrated ranks, receding into distance ; now seeming to close up near at 
hand, and shut out the world from us. The rare atmosphere of these high 
regions gave new zest to the journey, and we hardly knew that evening was at 
hand when we reached the State line and began to descend into the valley to 
"Hopkins's," the first station in North Carolina. 

In this remote and mountain-guarded dell, — this cup hollowed out of the 
Great Smoky range, visited only by the post -rider once a week, and the few 
farmers who go to the far towns of Eastern Tennessee to market, — we found the 
mountaineer in his native purity. No contact with even the people of the low- 
lands of his own State had given him familiarity with the w r orld. 

The people whom we passed as we rode on to Hopkins's, traveling along 
the roads out of Tennessee into North Carolina, were tall and robust; their 
language was peculiar, and their manners, although courteous, were awkward and 
rough. The gaunt, yellow-haired women were smoking, and trudged along con- 
tentedly beside the men, saying but little. They were neatly dressed in home- 
made clothes, and their hair was combed straight down over their cheeks and 
knotted into " pugs " behind. There were none of the modern conventionalities 
of dress visible about them. The men were cavalier enough ; their jean trow- 
sers were thrust into their boots, and their slouch hats cocked on their heads with 
bravado air. The hills rose high up around the humble log-dwelling of 
Hopkins, and a little road ran beside a roaring torrent which came down from 



> 



A Mountain Farmer. 



HOPKINS S — MOUNT STARLING AMONG THE PEAKS. 



483 



the mountain through a delicious valley, making charming nooks and niches 
among the round polished stones. 

Once a prosperous farmer, the war had left the venerable mountaineer only 
the wrecks of his home. Both parties had guerrillaed through the gorges and 
gaps; one "army" burned Hopkins's cabin, and the other stole his produce. 
High on the hill-sides grew the native grape ; a little cultivation would have 
turned the whole valley- cup into a fruitful vineyard ; but Hopkins said it was too 
late for him to try. It was, too, an excellent sheep-grazing country ; the wolves 
sometimes made cruel havoc, but shepherd-dogs could easily keep them off. 
Along the slopes of the Smoky beyond his home grew the finest of building 
timber, and water power was abundant; yet there were no frame houses for 
miles around. 

" Wal, you uns don't understand, I reckon," said Hopkins. " I hain't had a 
mighty sight o' git up since the war." 

Supper was served in the kitchen by one of the tall females we had observed 
upon the road, who was Hopkins's housekeeper, and who laid aside her pipe to 
come to the table and wait upon the strangers, whom, she said, she did not 
understand, " for you uns don't talk like we uns ;" adding that she " reckoned we 
found this a mighty fine country." 

Half a day's journey from this nook in the mountains brought us to the gap 
near Mount Starling, where we crossed through the Smoky range, and began to 
descend on the other side into Haywood county, a division of North Carolina, 
extending over 750 square miles, and annually producing more than 200,000 
bushels of corn. The chain of the Smoky mountain which we had traversed 
extends for about sixty-five miles, from the deep 
gorge through which the French Broad river flows 
at "Paint Rock" to the outlet of the Little Ten- 
nessee ; and Professor Guyot, who is authority upon 
the Appalachian system, calls it the master chain 
of the whole Alleghany region. 

The dominant peaks in this line of mountains 
north of Road Gap are Mount Guyot, 6,636 feet 
high ; Mounts Alexander, Henry, South, and Laurel 
Peaks, the True Brother, Thunder, Thermometer, 
Raven's, and Tricolor Knobs, and the Pillar Head 
of the straight fork of the Oconaluftee river. South 
of Road Gap rise the peaks known as " Clingman's 
Dome," 6,660 feet high ; Mounts Buckley, Love, 
Collins, and a dozen others, more than 5,000 feet high. 

Each of these rises to 6,000 feet elevation above 
mean-tide water, and many of them overtop Mount 
Washington, the monarch of the^ast, by several 
hundred feet. Seen from a distance, these mount- 
ains seem always bathed in a mellow haze, like that distinguishing the atmos- 
phere of Indian summer. The gap through which we passed was at an elevation 




We caught a glimpse of the symmetrical 
Catalouche mountain." [Page 484.] 



4«4 



CATALOUCHE MOUNTAIN HIGH PEAKS. 



of at least 5,000 feet; beneath us were vast canons, from which came up 
the roar of the creeks. 

We looked down upon the tops of mighty forests, and now and then, descend- 
ing, caught a glimpse of the symmetrical Catalouche mountain, fading away into 
distant blue. There are no gaps in the Smoky range which fall below the level 
of 5,000 feet, until Forney Ridge is passed; and there is a surprising number of 
peaks and domes rising higher than 6,000 feet. 




The Canon of the Catalouche as seen from "Bennett's." [Page 4S5.I 

Once having traversed the barriers created by this vast upheaval, one enters 
the mountainous region comprised between the Blue Ridge and the chain of the 
Iron, Smoky, and Unaka peaks. This region properly begins at the bifurcation 
of the two chains in Virginia, and extends across North Carolina and into 
Georgia for 108 miles. The chain of the Blue Ridge to the eastward is frag- 
mentary, and the gaps are only from 2,000 to 3,000 feet high. All the interior 



THE CANON OF THE CATALOUCHE. 485 

region between the Blue Ridge and the Smoky is filled with spurs and chains, of 
which, perhaps, the most noticeable is the great Balsam, whose highest point, 
called the Richland Balsam, or Caney Creek Balsam Divide, reaches the height 
of 6,425 feet. Into this cluster of highlands, extending to the extreme western 
boundary of North Carolina, we now daily made our way. 

This day's journey was but a succession of grand panoramic views of gorge 
and height. Descending, we rode for several miles along a path cut out of the 
mountain's steep side ; and hundreds of feet below us saw the tops of tall pines 
and spruces. Not a human habitation was to be seen ; there was no sign of life 
save when a ruffled grouse or a rabbit sprang across the track. 

Now we came into a valley, through which a wide creek flowed rapidly, 
finding its outlet between two hills towering thousands of feet above us, and 
there, at a rude cabin, stopped to feed our weary horses, and to partake of the 
milk, the honey, and the corn-bread set before us ; to lie on the turf beside the 
cool stream, and to drink in at every pore the delicious inspiration of the pure 
mountain air. Remounting, we climbed along the side of shaggy " Catalouche," 
until, late in the afternoon, we came to " Bennett's." 

Imagine a little frame house set on a shelf on the road, so that its inmates can 
look for miles down a deep straight valley, through which flows a river between 
banks fringed with dense foliage, and by rocks over which pines lean and 
straggle in wildest confusion. At the far end of this river valley looms up a tall 
mountain peak, so beautiful that one's soul is lifted at very sight of it. As our 
little company drew rein at the edge of the steep bank leading to the canon, 
there was a universal cry of delight. Bennett's folks called to us at that moment, 
"Won't you 'light,' strangers, 'n come in?" We sat long in the little porch,, 
gazing at Oconoluftee's height, and the Balsam mountains, dimly shadowed 
beyond the point where the valley was lost in the breast of the hills. The 
grandeur of the sentinel mountain, standing alone at the end of the chasm; the 
reflections of high rocks and mighty tree-trunks in the far-away stream ; the 
dizzy precipices which overhung the rarely frequented valley, lent a charm which 
carried its terror with it. 

The road grew narrower and rockier as we clambered along Catalouche ; but 
the air was cooler, purer, the laurels more abundant, the vistas more charming ; 
until just at sunset we came to the " Cove Creek Gap." In front lay a narrow 
valley, over which the mountain known as Jonathan's Bald threw his shadow ; 
but beyond ! — 

High on the horizon lay a wavy line of hills, sharply outlined in the strong 
glare of the sunset, their delicate blue colors springing so suddenly upon our 
vision against the purple and crimson of the evening tints that we were surprised 
and delighted. As far as eye could reach, to right, to left, in front, stood the 
long line of uplifted crags, from which there seemed no outlet ! Turning our 
horses on the crest of the mountain, and looking Tennesseeward, we saw our old 
friends of the Great Smoky, scattered for miles in friendly groups among the 
dark forests ; westward and eastward deep ravines, and, beyond them, uncounted 
peaks, which the very sky seemed tenderly to bend over and kiss. 



486 Jonathan's creek valley — waynesville. 

It was fast growing dark as we rode on to the winding road in the valley of 
Jonathan's creek. As we were rattling by a log farm-house in a deadening, a 
loud voice cried : 

" Strangers, wait a minnit till I ketch my ole mule, or he '11 foller you uns 
clean down to Boyd's, I reckon." 

The owner of the voice, carrying a log on his shoulder, came up through the 
fields as he said this, and, throwing down his burden, secured the restive mule, 
who was looking over the low fence ; after which he turned to each one of the 
party, and asked : 

" What mout be your name ?" 

Having satisfied his curiosity thus, he gave us good evening civilly enough, 
and struggled with his log again. 

Farther on a young farmer crossing the creek came to us as we inquired the 
distance, and, before giving us the desired information, said, " What mout be 
your names ?" " Whar are ye from ?" After which he added carelessly, " Mile 
'n half; good evenin'." 



iU. *.* 



=-gsw««K 




Mount Pisgah, Western North Carolina. [Page 4S7. 

Troops of children played about the doors of all the cabins along these roads. 
Families of ten and twelve are by no means uncommon. Girls and boys work 
afield with their parents in the summer, and pass the winter with but limited 
chances for culture. 

Passing around the base of "Jonathan's Creek Bald," we came into a more 
open and fertile country, where the farm-houses were neatly built and painted, 
and the wheat-fields were wide and well stocked. The creeks were numerous, 
and everywhere bordered by fascinating foliage ; at each turn in the road there 
was a picture ; one was constantly reminded of the rich views in the Loire 
country in France, or of the fat fields of Alsatia. 

On the plain of Waynesville, 2,756 feet above the level of tide-water, and in 
the shadow of the great Balsam range, stands Waynesville town. The approaches 
to it are lovely, but the view from the town itself is lovelier still. On all sides 
rise the mountains ; the village nestles between the forks of the Pigeon river, 
nowhere more beautiful than within a few miles of this nook. 



THE BALSAM PEAKS — THE BALD MOUNTAINS. 



487 



To the westward lie the Balsam peaks, seven of which, Amos Plott's, the 
" Great Divide," Brother Plott, Rocky Face, Rockstand Knob, and the two 
Junaleskas, tower more than 6,000 feet high. They are clad, upon their 
summits, in the sombre garb of the balsam, the sad and haughty monarch of 
the heights, whose odorous boughs brush against the clouds, and whose deep 
thickets, into which the sun himself can hardly penetrate, afford a refuge for 
the wolf and the bear. The balsam is emphatically an aristocratic tree ; it is 
never found in the humble valleys, and rarely lower than an elevation of 4,000 
feet; it consorts with the proud rhododendron, whose scarlet bloom was the 
object of the Indian's most passionate adoration, and its grand stem springs 
from among the decaying and moss-grown rocks. 

■ On these Balsams, as on the great Black mountains, the moss offers an elastic 
carpet sometimes a foot thick, and is tough and hard as the hides of the bears 
who delight to disport upon it. Here and there on the sides of the Plott peaks 
there is a long furrow which marks the path cut by some adventurous woodsman. 
The peaks are not romantically named ; the unimaginative early settlers called 
them after the men who owned or lived near them ; 
and many of the most imposing heights are still nameless. 

The Bald mountains,; — -so called because their summits 
are destitute of forest, and because the sun makes the 
rocks on their tops glisten like a bald man's shining 
poll,— are numerous in the vicinity of Waynesville. 
North and north-east of the town lie the "Crab Tree" 
and "Sandy Mush" Balds, and beyond them in the 
same direction rises "Bear Wallow" mountain. On the 
south and south-east are " Mount Pisgah," the " High 
Tower," and Cold mountain, which rises 6,063 ^ ee t out 
of the "Big Pigeon" valley; and away to the south and 
south-east stretches the chain of the "Richland Balsam." 

The dry and pure air of Waynesville gives new value 
to life ; the healthy man feels a strange glow and inspira- 
tion while in the shadow of these giant peaks. The town 
is composed of one long street of wooden houses, wan- 
dering from mountain base to mountain base. It has a 
trio of country stores ; a cozy and delightful little hotel, 
nestling under the shade of a huge tree ; an old wooden 
church perched on a hill, with a cemetery filled with 
ancient tombs, where the early settlers lie at rest, and 
an academy. 

There is no whir of wheels. The only manufacturing 
establishments are flour- mills located on the various 
creeks and rivers, or a stray saw- mill ; while here and there a wealthy land 
owner is building an elegant home with all the modern improvements. By 
nine o'clock at night there is hardly a light in the village ; a few belated 
horsemen steal noiselessly through the street, or the faint tinkle of a banjo 




The Carpenter — A Study from 
Waynesville Life. 



488 



NOTES FROM WAYNESVILLE, 



and the patter of a negro's feet testify to an innocent merry-making. The 
Court-House of Haywood county, and the Jail, both modest two-story brick 
structures, are the public buildings, the Jail having only now and then an 
inmate, for the county is as orderly as a community of Quakers. The Mar- 
shal, as in most of these small Western North Carolina towns, is the power which 
maintains and enforces the law. No liquor is sold within a mile of the town's 
boundary; some lonely and disreputable shanty, with the words "BAR-ROOM" 
inscribed upon it, on a clearing along the highway, being the only resort for those 
who drink "spirits." The sheriff, the local clergyman, the county surveyor, and 
the village doctor, ride about the country on their nags, gossiping and dreamily 
enjoying the glorious air ; nowhere is there bustle or noise of trade. The county 
court's session is the event of the year ; the mail, brought forty-five miles over 
the mountain roads from the nearest railroad, is light, and the stage-coaches 
bring few passengers from the outer world. 

But what a perfect summer retreat ; what chances for complete rest ; what 
grandeur of mountains ; what quiet rippling of gentle rivers ; what noble 
sunsets ; what wealth of color and dreaminess of twilight ; what breezy morn- 




View on Pigeon River, near Waynesville. 



ings, when the mists fly away from the deep ravines in the mountain chains, and 
shadow and sun play hide and seek on the dense masses of the Balsam tops ! 

The great counties of Haywood, Jackson, Macon, Cherokee, Buncombe, 
Henderson, Madison and Yancey, contain the principal portion of the mountain 
scenery of western North Carolina. The mighty transverse chains of the Nan- 
tahela, Cowee, Balsam and Black mountains, run across these counties from the 
Smoky range to the Blue Ridge, and the traveler wandering from county seat to 
county seat must constantly climb lofty heights, pass through rugged gaps, and 
descend into deep valleys. 

Western North Carolina is not only exceedingly fertile, but abounds in the 
richer minerals, and needs but the magic wand of the capitalist waved over it to 
become one of the richest sections of this Union. Occupying one-third of the 
entire area of the State, and possessing more than a quarter of a million of 
inhabitants, its present prospects are by no means disagreeable ; but its prom- 
inent citizens, of all walks in life, are anxious for immigration and development 
of the rich stores of gold, iron, copper, mica, and other minerals now buried in 
the hills. 



AGRICULTURE AND GRAZING IN THE MOUNTAINS. &9 

Let no one fancy that this mountain region is undesirable as an agricultural 
country; there are few richer, or better adapted to European immigration. The 
staple productions of Haywood county are corn, wheat, rye, oats and hay ; all 
vegetables grow abundantly, and the whole county is admirably fitted for 
grazing. The level bottom-lands on Pigeon river and' its numerous tributaries 
are under fine cultivation ; the uplands and the slopes produce rich wheat ; the 
ash, the sugar maple, the hickory, and the oak, are abundant ; and white pine is 
rafted down the Pigeon river in large quantities yearly. 

But the exceptional fertility of most of the ranges throughout all the counties 
mentioned is the great pride of the section. The sides and tops of the mount- 
ains are, in many cases, covered with a thick, vegetable mould,* in which grow 
flourishing trees and rank grasses. Five thousand feet above the sea-level one 
finds grasses and weeds that remind him of the lower region swamps. Cattle 
are kept in excellent condition all winter on the " evergreen " growing along the 
sides of the higher chains. Winter and summer, before the ravages of the war 
thinned out their stocks, the farmers kept hundreds of cattle on the mountains, 
feeding entirely on the grasses. In the spring the herds instinctively seek the 
young grasses springing up on the slopes, but with the coming of winter they 
return to the tops to find the evergreen. The balsam-tree can easily be ban- 
ished, for, after being felled for a few months, it will burn easily, and in its stead 
will spring up thick coats of evergreen. On some of the mountain farms corn 
yields one hundred bushels to the acre, and wheat, oats, rye and barley, flourish 
proportionately. In the " deadenings," where the large timber has been girdled 
and left to die, and the undergrowth has been carefully cleared, timothy and 
orchard grass will grow as high as wheat. 

The native grape, too, flourishes on all the hill-sides, within certain thermal 
lines established by observation of the elder mountaineers ; and varieties of 
grapes can be selected, and so planted as to ripen at different periods of the 
autumn. The negro population is not numerous in Western North Carolina. 
Wherever the black man is found, however, he is industrious, faithful, and usually 
quite prosperous. In some of the small tows, as at Waynesville, we found a 
gentleman's valet of other days officiating as village tailor, barber, errand boy, 
coachman and " factotum." 

* Testimony of Professor Richard Owen, of the Indiana State University. 



X88 



LVI. 



THE "SUGAR FORK" AND DRY FALLS — WHITESIDE MOUNTAIN. 



IT is sometimes said that Western North Carolina is shaped like a bow, of 
which the Blue Ridge would form the arc, and the Smoky mountains the 
string. Within this semicircle our little party, now and then increased by the 

advent of citizens of the 
various counties, who came 



to journey with us from 
point to point, traveled 
about 600 miles on horse- 
back, now sleeping at night 
in the lowly cabins, and 
sharing the rough fare of 
the mountaineers, now 
entering the towns and 
finding the mansions of the 
wealthier classes freely 
opened to us. Up at 
dawn, and away over hill 
and dale; now clambering 
miles among the forests to 
look at some new mine; 
now spurring our horses to 
reach shelter long after 
night had shrouded the 
roadways, we met with un- 
varying courtesy and 
unbounded welcome. 

As a rule, the younger 
men with whom we talked 
were hopeful, very much 
in earnest, generally free 
from the mountain rustic 
dialect ; took in one or two 
newspapers, and were in- 
terested in the outer world 
and general legislation ; but 
their fathers, the farmers of the "befo' the waw" epoch, were discouraged and 
somewhat discontented at the new order of things ; looked upon mineral hunters 




The Dry Fall of the Sugar Fork, Blue Ridge, North Carolina. [Page 497.] 



MINERALS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, >I 

and railroad route surveyors with coldness or contempt; and were wont to 
complain of their own lot and of all the results of the war, . The yet rr; and 
prominent men in most of the counties were good companions and enthusiastic 
friends ; they had none of the artificial manners of the town, none of its guile. 

Wherever we went we found the "rock-hunters" had been ahead of us, and a 
halt by the wayside at noon would generally bring to us some denizen of the 
neighborhood, who would say, " Good mornin', gentlemen. After rocks ?" — 
and would then produce from his pockets some specimens which he was " mighty 
certain he did n't know the name of." Many a farmer had caught the then 
prevalent mica fever, and some had really found deposits of the valuable mineral 
which were worth thousands of dollars. 

There is little danger of overestimating the mineral wealth of this mount- 
ain country ; it is really very great. There are stores of gold, silver, iron, copper, 
zinc, corundum, coal, alum, copperas, barytes, and marl, which seem limitless. 
There are fine marble and limestone quarries whose value was unsuspected until 
the railroad pioneer disclosed it. The limestone belt of Cherokee county, a wild 
and romantic region still largely inhabited by Cherokee Indians, contains stores 
of marble, iron and gold ; Jackson county possesses a vast copper belt ; and the 
iron-beds of the Yellow mountains are attracting much notice. The two most 
remarkable gold regions are in Cherokee and Jackson counties. 

The Valley river sands have been made, in former times, to yield handsomely, 
and now and then good washings have been found along its tributaries. The 
gold is found in veins and superficial deposits in the same body of slates which 
carries limestone and iron. Before the war liberal arrangements had been made 
for mining in Cherokee, but since the struggle the works remain incomplete. It 
is supposed that the gold belt continues south-westward across the country, as 
other mines are found in the edge of Georgia. 

The gold of Jackson county is obtained from washings along the southern 
slopes of the Blue Ridge, near the mountains known as " Hogback" and " Chim- 
ney Top ;" and Georgetown creek, one of the head streams of the Toxaway, 
yielded several hundred thousand dollars a few years ago. In this wild country, 
where the passes of the Blue Ridge rise precipitously 800 and 1,000 feet, there 
lie great stores of gold. 

Overman, the metallurgist, unhesitatingly declares that he believes a second 
California is hidden in these rocky walls. The monarch mountain "Whiteside" 
is said to be rich in gold. 

It is possible that the iron ore of these mountains will not be speedily 
developed, as capital is now so powerfully attracted to Missouri, and other States, 
where remarkable deposits exist ; but there is no denying the richness of Chero- 
kee, Mitchell, Buncombe, Haywood, Jackson, and Macon counties in that mineral. 
In Cherokee the hematite ores outcrop in immense quantities along the Hiawas- 
see and Valley rivers, and, when wrought in the commonest county bloomeries, 
have yielded an astonishing per cent. Rivers flow directly through the iron 
regions in this section, furnishing every needed facility for transportation ; and 
limestone and forest fuel abound. Magnetic ores are found in Madison, Hay- 



49--' 



FROM WAYNKSVILLE TO WHITESIDE. 



wood and Macon counties ; and there are large outcroppings of hematite in 
Buncombe. 

Our expedition grew rapidly after we left Waynesville, and our group of 
horsemen, followed by "the baggage train," toiling along the mountain roads, 
caused a genuine excitement at the farms by the way. One of our most memor- 
able trips was that from Waynesville to Whiteside and the return. 

Upon the beautiful country through which we were now wandering the 
Indian lavished that wealth of affection which he always feels for nature, but 
never for man. He gave to the hills and streams the soft poetic names of his 
expansive language — names which the white man has in many cases cast away, 
substituting the barbarous commonplaces of the rude days of early settlement. 

The Cherokee names of Cowee and Cullowhee, of Watauga, of Tuckaseege, 
and Nantahela, have been retained ; and some of the elder settlers still pronounce 
them with the charming Indian accent and inflection. The Cowee mountain 




View near Webster, North Carolina. 

range runs between Jackson and Macon counties, and the valley of Tuckaseege, 
walled in four crooked, immense stretches, includes all of Jackson county which 
lies north of the Blue Ridge. 

The river itself, one of the most picturesque in the South, "heads" in the 
Blue Ridge, and swelling into volume from a hundred springs of coldest, purest, 
most transparent water, which send little torrents down all the deep ravines, it 
goes foaming and dashing over myriads of rocks, sometimes leaping from dizzy 
heights into narrow canons, until it comes to, and is lost in, the Tennessee. 
Where the Tuckaseege forces its way through the Cullowhee mountains there is 
a stupendous cataract. 

The little inn at Webster, the seat of justice of Jackson county, was none too 
large to accommodate our merry cavalcade. We came to it through the Balsam 
mountains from Waynesville, along a pretty road bordered with farms and giant 
mulberry-trees. In the valleys we saw the laurel and the dwarf rosebay, the 



WEBSTER THE COWEE RANGE FRANKLIN. 493 

passion flower and the Turk's-cap lily, and on the mountain si Jes the poplar or 
tulip-tree, the hickory, ash, black and white walnut, the holly, the chincapin, the 
alder, and the chestnut, each in profusion. 

Webster is a little street of wooden houses, which seem mutely protesting 
against being pushed off into a ravine. For miles around the country is grand 
and imposing. A short time before our arrival the residents of the county had 
been edified by the execution of the only highwayman who has appeared in 
Western North Carolina for many years. The hanging occurred in front of the 
jail in the village street, and thousands flocked to see it from all the section 
round about. 

Sunset came with a great seal of glory. Before the dawn we were once more 
in the saddle, en route for the Cowee range. Just below Webster we crossed the 
Tuckaseege river at a point where once there was a famous Indian battle, and 
wound up the zigzag paths to the very top of Cowee, now and then getting a 
glimpse of the noble Balsam left behind. Now we could look up at one of the 
"old balds," as the bare peaks' tops are called. (The Indian thought the bare 
spots were where the feet of the Evil One had pressed as he strode from 
mountain to mountain.) Now we stopped under a sycamore, while a barefooted 
girl brought a pitcher of buttermilk from the neighboring house ; now a group of' 
negro children, seeing a band of eight horsemen approaching, made all speed for 
the house, evidently thinking us Ku-Klux or " Red Strings " resuscitated ; and 
now a smart shower would beat about our heads, and die away in tearful whis- 
perings among the broad leaves. The mile-stones by the roadside were notched 
to indicate the distance ; and from hour to hour, in the mountain passes, stops 
were made to whoop up the laggards. 

In the rich coves in Jackson county the black mould is more than two feet in 
depth, and the most precipitous mountain sides are grazing pastures, from which 
thousands of fat cattle are annually driven down to the seaboard markets. In the 
ranges, too, where the winter grass grows luxuriantly from November until May, 
great numbers of horses and mules are raised. Fruit grows with Eden-like lux- 
uriance ; the apple is superb, and on the thermal belt in all this section the fruit 
crop never fails. 

Near Franklin, close to the site of an old Indian fortification, we crossed the 
"Little Tennessee," a stately river, along whose banks are noble quarries of 
marble, never yet worked. The chief town of Macon county was fair to look 
upon, seated amidst well- cultivated fields, and in the immediate vicinity of a 
grand grazing country ; but we pushed on into the mountains once more, anxious 
to pass the Blue Ridge and climb the ribs of "Whiteside." Three hundred 
thousand acres still remain unimproved in Macon, and at least one-third of these 
are rich in minerals. 

We were now approaching the extreme western border of the State. A little 
beyond lay Cherokee and Clay counties, a territory taken from the Indians by 
treaty no later than 1835-36. They lie in the valley of the Hiawassee, which 
is famous as the place where the first successful treaty was made. We pushed on 
until dark, and our little party was dispersed at the various farm-houses on the 

32 



494 THE SUGARTOWN FORK OF THE TENNESSEE. 

road, with iristi uetions to gallop up and meet in the morning before reaching the 
foot of the Blue Ridge. 

The stream along whose banks we were now ascending the mountain is known 
as the " Sugartown " or " Sugar Fork " of the Tennessee river, and comes foam- 
ing down the wild slopes of the Blue Ridge through some of the most romantic 
scenery in America. Beautiful as the Rhone in the Alps, majestic in its 
tremendous waterfalls, and the wild grandeur of the passes through which it 
flows, it is strange that few travelers from other States have ever penetrated 
to its upper waters. 

It was not without difficulty that our party reassembled the next morning. 
The Colonel and the sprightly Jonas came galloping from a town ten miles away, 
where they had been compelled to remain overnight, and the others came 
straggling to the- rendezvous. The village physician from Webster, who knew 
every foot of the way for forty miles around, the cheery landlord from Waynes- 
ville, and the writer climbed the steep hill-side slowly under a broiling sun ; the 
artist, hungry for sketches, browsed lightly on the delicate vistas afforded by 
every turn in the road ; and the Judge, who had enlisted in our service that 
genial and venerable mountaineer, Silas McDowell, was actively hunting for the 
obscure pathway leading to the lower falls ; while the colored servant guided an 
overloaded buggy along the rocky road. 

As we reached the crest of the hill a sound like the sweep of the wind 
through the forest in autumn, or the distant echo of the rush of a railway train, 
drifted to our ears. Now it was swept away, now came back again powerfully. 
It was the voice of the fall in the canon below, and old Mr. McDowell, reining 
in his horse and placing his hand to his ear, listened intently a minute, then 
announced that the pathway to the falls was not far, between Lamb and Skittles 
mountains, from that spot. So we began to search for it, some one meantime 
volunteering the information that the ravines abounded with rattlesnakes, and 
that one must tread carefully. 

"What do you think of that?" said one, turning to the gray-haired guide. 
" Had we better go down this way ?" 

" Sir," said he, fiercely, " I have a contempt for snakes, sir. I kick them out 
of my way, sir. I kill them before they have a chance to bite me, sir." 

Cold comfort, but no alternative ; and, Indian-file, we moved toward the 
descent. After a walk of 200 yards through a pleasant grass-grown space, we 
came to the hill's abrupt sides, broken by ledges and clothed with tangled vines 
and underbrush. A slight and scarcely perceptible trail led along the dizzy 
height, but was now and then lost entirely as one came to a rock, over which he 
was compelled to crawl and drop cautiously into black-looking caves and dens, 
out of which the only sortie was another still more difficult scramble. 

Bears are often seen in these mountains now-a-days, and " hard times " will 
bring them into the vicinity of the farmers' cabins. The bear of this region 
is black, grows somewhat larger than in the swamps of the eastern part of the 
State, and has a glossy fur-like coat of hair. One sometimes comes upon the 
wallows in the moss where Bruin has been taking his siesta. 



GETTING DOWN TO THE FALL. 



495 



Half-way down the mountain we could hear the roar of the far, and some- 
times, through an opening in the trees, catch a glimpse of the white foam as it 
poured over the rocks. Guided by the Judge's cheery halk and the occa- 
sional crack of a revolver, we reached the valley, swinging down by branches 
of trees, and tearing our hands against the rough rocks. The Colonel suddenly 
disappeared. 

Many a halloo failed to bring him, and I waded through the cold pool at the 
foot of a great ledge, staggered out of the knee-deep, chilly water on to a 




Sugar Fork Fall, Blue Rid 



shelving platform, clambered over a half-rotten tree-trunk, and reached a pin- 
nacle midstream, from whose jagged summit I could see the top of the falls and 
the twin pine-trees leaning over the huge chasm as if it awed at the spectacle. 
Around this pinnacle ran a whirlpool, which made a fierce eddy at the very base 
of the projection on which I stood. Forcing myself up among the extending 
boughs of another pine-tree, with my boots in one hand and my staff in my 



49^ THE WATERFALL IN THE CANON. 

mouth, I was just reaching the top when a limb gave way, and I slid rapidly 
down twenty feet directly toward the pool. A desperate wrench at a knot on 
the tree stopped me, however, and I finally reached my perch in safety. 

To the right was a ledge, a hundred feet high, down which trailed moss and 
vines, and along which grew tiny white blossoms in dense masses. Far below 
this ledge on a rock, which he had reached by a dexterous drop, sat. the artist, 
sketching. In the distance was Jonas, clambering on all fours up a wet stone 
directly under the shadow of the fall, and now and then turning to whoop at the 
others. No Judge, no Colonel visible ! but now and then a faint halloo showed 
them still struggling in the glens. 

A gap in the mountains, high up, was pierced by a rapidly flowing stream, 
which boiled into whitest foam as it sprang down the sides of a great rock 
from a shelf jutting out of the mass. At the right grew tall trees and infinite 
small foliage, clothing the walls, which descended hundreds of feet, with living 
green, and with blue, white, and red blossoms ; on the left the ledge ran up into 
a peak in front, then receded toward the crest of the hill which we had left. 
Eighty or ninety feet below the shelf from which the foam leaped it met some 
obstacle, and, springing to the right in blinding clouds of spray, which at times 
filled the canon for some distance, it formed a second fall extending thirty feet 
down to the lower channel. 

On the left, across the face of the lower part of the cliff, ran minor torrents, 
bubbling and seething, and everywhere the current was swift, strong, and 
musical. Landing as I did midstream, and facing the fall, there seemed no 
exit from the valley save by balloon. On every side the walls appeared to 
rise perpendicularly, and, indeed, the trail was found only after vexatious 
scrambling among the rocks. When I reached the top, the others had departed, 
and I overtook them at a log-cabin, where they had halted for dinner. The 
Colonel smilingly presented himself. 

" I got a fall from a high rock," said he, in apology, " and lost the antidote 
for rattlesnake bites, which I carried for you others, out of my pocket. It took 
me a good hour to find it again. Besides, I have seen the falls once before." 

The cabin where we rested stood on a very steep hill-side, and was com- 
posed of two solidly-constructed square log buildings, connected by a porch. 
The furniture was of the simplest character. There was a fire-place, a rough 
board-table, with benches around it, a spinning-wheel, and a quilting-frame, at 
which three tall girls were busily working. The rude walls and the plank floor 
were bare. 

In the other room stood one or two high bedsteads, of simple pattern ; a 
mirror, a few inches square, hung near them ; a little stand with a Bible on it, 
and a rustic bureau pushed against the wall. The venerable matron of the house- 
hold, with her gray hair combed smoothly back under her sun-bonnet, which she 
kept on, stood guard over the table with a fly-brush, and while she gossiped with 
the Doctor, served buttermilk from an earthen jar. 

" Jeems — Jeems is my youngest son's name, Doctor. He '11 be eighteen 
this year; 'n he's a right smart boy." 



MOUNTAIN FOLK THE "DRY FALL." j 497 

Although sixty, at least, the matron was strong and hearty; had reared a 
large family, and never felt the need of anything more than shej^ossessed. 
" Reckoned them folks that was huntin' for rocks better tend to ther corn, 
she did." 

A little higher up the mountain, in the mica-lands, our artist was confronted 
by the belle of that region. She was pretty. She had evidently been informed 
as to our coming by the cunning mischief of the urbane Colonel, and approach- 
ing the man of pencils remarked, with a delightful bashfulness : 

" I want you to take my picture." 

Imagine h'im trying to explain. 

" Well, they said anyway that you 'd take all our pictures, 'n my sister 's 
waitin' up t' our house's, 'n law ! how fur'd you uns come this mornin' ? Jim 
Lawson ! ef you don't keep thet horse's heels away from me !" to a North Car- 
olina cavalier, anxious to show us his horsemanship by plunging down a steep 
bank. 

Straightway she led the gentle artist captive, — the pretty mountain girl with 
her hair combed smoothly down over her cheeks, and with her comely form 
robed in green. 

By and by, in the afternoon, the reunited party, as it crept skyward, plunged, 
Indian-file, into the forest, and took its way to the " Dry Falls." A silence, not 
of gloom but of reverence, seemed to fall upon all as we entered the aisles of the 
grand wood, and climbed the knolls which rose like whales' backs every few 
hundred yards. We were already well upon the Blue Ridge, and crossing 
toward its southern side, in which the monarch rocks " Whiteside," " Black 
Rock," " Stooly," and " Fodder Stack," are rooted. Here and there the " Sur- 
veyor," who had joined us, stopped to look for his mark on a tree, and his sturdy 
little horse seemed by instinct to find his way athwart the furze. 

After two miles of climbing, sometimes where the hills were so steep that in 
descending a misstep of the horse would have cost one a broken limb, we came to 
a long line of laurel thicket. Here, taking our oil capes, we scrambled into the 
bushes, and, stooping, worked our way to a cliff, down which rugged steps were 
cut, and stood where we could overlook the canon into which the upper fall of 
the Sugar Fork sent its leaping water. 

The Hibernianism by which this glorious cascade gets its designation of the 
" Dry Falls," was suggested by the possibility of passing beneath the giant shelf, 
over which it pours, without severe wetting, although the spray is at times blind- 
ing. The river, coming to a dizzy height, leaps out with such force, that the 
water is projected far from the rock, and the beholder seems to see a lace veil, at 
least sixty feet long, dependent from the hoary walls of the canon. Passing 
under it, along the slippery rocks, one comes out upon another stone under 
beetling precipices, from which little streams run down, and around which the 
mist and spray rise, and can note the changing gleams of the sunshine as they 
play on the immense mass of foam suspended between earth and sky. 

Below, the stream passionately clutches at the rocks, and now and then 
throws them down into the chasm ; there are hollows in the stones, which have 



498 APPROACHING WHITESIDE. 

been worn to a considerable depth by the pattering of the spray upon them for 
hundreds of years. Here a mass of wall rises dozens of feet from the chaos of 
rocks which is huddled at the fall's bottom. Many of the rude figures seem to 
have human resemblances, and one might imagine them giants rising from the 
canon's depths to tear away the veil which has been drawn across the entrance to 
their cavern. 

A hundred and fifty feet below the summit of the falls, the stream runs on 
in whirlpools and eddies, now forming into inlets in which reeds, ferns and 
blossoms flourish, and now making a deep, steady current, cold and crystal clear. 
The pines and spruces seventy feet high seem but toys by the sides of these 
immense walls ; the light, too, in the gap through the mountain, is strange and 
fantastic, and seems to cast a glamour over every minute object. Even the 
pebbles, and the ferns and tiny grass-sprouts in the soil beneath the shelf over 
which the fall pours, are purple. 

Then the voice — the voice of the fall ! Heard from the laurel thicket, it 
seems to come from the very ground under your feet ; heard from the cavern 
into which you pass, it is sombre and complaining, like the winter wind about 
the house chimneys ; and its echoes from the foot of the rapids, to which you 
may descend if you have firm nerves and a quick step, are like those from some 
unseen choir in a cathedral gallery, — some chant of priests at High Mass, 
monotonous, grand, inspiring; "the height, the glow, the gloom, the glory," all 
blended, shock and awe the soul. 

Here is a fall upon whose virgin rocks no quack has painted his shameless 
sign ; whose precipices have not been invaded by the mob of the grand tour ; 
whose solitary magnificence thrills and impresses you as if in some barren land 
you came upon the dazzling lustre of a priceless diamond. But to this, and its 
brother a few miles below, the feet of thousands of the curious will hereafter 
wander. 

The shadows were creeping over the mighty hills as we hastened back across 
the wooded slopes, and leaving the main road a little farther on, entered a narrow 
trail, obstructed by swampy holes and gnarled tree-roots. Three miles brought 
us to "Wright's" — the little farm-house in a deadening from which we obtained 
a view of " Short-Off," — and the forest which hid the approaches to "Whiteside." 
For some time we had felt the exhilarating effects of the keen, rarefied air, and 
had noticed the exquisite atmospheric effects peculiar to these regions. The 
figure of the distant mountain stood out with startling clearness against the 
heavens; it seemed near at hand, whereas it was in reality miles away. The 
land is of wonderful fertility ; even the imperfect cultivation which it has received 
in the clearings gives surprising results ; and the timber is magnificent. All the 
land is suitable for small grains and roots, gives fine pasturage, and there are 
numerous quartz veins running through the hills, indicating the presence of gold 
in large quantities. The Indians once mined successfully for silver along the 
slopes of the Blue Ridge, near " Whiteside ;" but, although they left the region 
only thirty years ago, and search has often been made for their riches, no traces 
of them have yet been found. 



THE DEVIL S COURT-HOUSE. 



499 



The Spaniards once prospected for minerals, and with evident success, in all 
these regions ; and in Cherokee county immense excavations, supposed to be the 
work of De Soto and his army, have been discovered. Some years ago copper 
crucibles, with traces of white metal still remaining in them, were unearthed at a 
place where a vein of lead, silver and gold may be noted. 

The summit of Whiteside is perhaps 5,000 feet high, but its peculiar location 
enables one to gain from it the most striking prospect in North Carolina. It 
overlooks a country of peaks and projections, of frightful precipices, often of 
naked rock, but generally fringed with delicate foliage ; a country dotted with 
fertile clearings set down in the midst of forests ; of valleys inaccessible save by 




The Devil's Court-House, Whiteside Mountain. 

narrow passes ; of curious caves and tangled trails ; of buttes and knobs, reached 
only by dangerous passes, where one finds the bluff's base thousands of feet 
down in some nook, and as he looks up sees the wall towering far above him. 

At dawn of next day we plunged into, the woods beyond "Wright's," and 
wound through a trail whose trace we of the cities should soon have lost, but in 
which our companions of the neighborhood easily kept until we reached a wooded 
hill-side, whence we could see the "Devil's Court-House," and catch a glimpse of 
" Whiteside's " top. 



500 THE SUMMIT OF WHITESIDE. 

The former is a grand, rocky bluff, with its foot planted among the thickets, 
and its brow crowned with a rugged castle-like formation. The ragged sides are 
here and there stained like the walls of an old building, and it is not difficult to 
imagine that one is beholding the ruined walls of some giant castle. The " Sur- 
veyor " urged us forward, and our stout horses soon brought us to the clearing, 
where we were compelled to leave them, and climb the remaining distance on foot. 

Here, more than 4,000 feet above the ocean- level, the sun beat down with 
extreme fierceness, and was reflected back from the hard white of the rocks with 
painful intensity. The horses tethered, the Judge sprang up the narrow pathway, 
and regardless of rattlesnakes, we clambered on all fours, clinging sometimes to 
roots, sometimes to frail and yielding bunches of grass and ferns ; now trod 
breathlessly a path in the black dirt on the edge of a rock sixty feet high ; now 
hung, poised by our hands, from one ledge while we swung to another ; and now 
dug out footholds in the stone when we ascended an almost perpendicular 
wall. 

Finally we came to a plateau 'covered with a kind of gorse, and with laurel 
bushes scattered here and there ; pushing through this, we wound, by a gradual 
ascent, to the summit of Whiteside, and the edge of the precipice. There we 
were face to face with the demon of the abyss. 

Let me tell you how the Surveyor saw him. 

" One day," said the Surveyor, seating himself with admirable carelessness on 
the dreadful slope of a rock overhanging the awful depths, " I was taking some 
levels below, and at last thought I would climb Whiteside. While I was coming 
up a storm passed over the mountains, and when I reached the top everything 
was hidden in such a dense mist, fog, or cloud, that one could hardly see his 
hand before his face. I strolled on until I reached a spot which I thought I 
recognized, and sat down, stretching my feet carelessly. 

" Luckily enough, I did n't move ; I was mighty still, for I was tired, and the 
fog was solemn-like ; but pretty soon it blew away right smart, and dog my skin 
if I was n't perched on the very outer edge of this line of rock, and about two 
inches between me and twelve hundred feet of sheer fall. 

" I saw the trees in Casher's valley, and the clearings, and then the sky, for I 
did n't look twice at the fall below me; but I flattened myself against the rock, and 
turned over; and I never want to come up here in a fog again." 

Imagine a waterfall 2,000 feet high suddenly turned to stone, and you have 
the general effect of the Whiteside precipice as seen in the single, terrified, reluct- 
ant glance which you give from the top. There is the curve and the grand, 
dizzy bend downward ; were it not for occasional clumps of foliage down the 
sides, the resemblance would be absolute. 

The mountain itself lies rooted in the western slope of the Blue Ridge. The 
veteran McDowell has compared ;t to the carcass of some great monster, upon 
whose head you climb, and along whose mammoth spine you wander, giddy with 
terror each time you gaze over the skeleton sides. 

The main rock stands on a hill 1,600 feet high, and its upper crest is 2,400 
feet above the branch of the Chattooga river, which runs near the hill's base. 



THE OUTLOOK OVER THE MOUNTAINS. 



5oj 



From top to tail of the mammoth skeleton the distance is 800 feet. Viewed at a 
proper distance, in the valley below, from its south-east front, it is one of the 
sublimest natural monuments in the United States. The sunshine plays upon 
walls which are at times of dazzling whiteness, and the sheer fall seems to 
continue to the very level of the valley, although it is here and 
there broken by landings. 

But the outlook! It was the culmination — the finishing 
stroke of all our rich and varied mountain surprises ! When 
we were seated on the white crag, over 
which a fresh breeze perpetually blew, 
the "wrinkled" world beneath us literally 
"crawled." Everything seemed dwarfed 
and insignificant below. Even the 
brother crags — to the south-west, Fod- 
derstack and Black Rock, and Stooly, 
to the north-west — although in reality 
rising nearly to the elevation of White- 
side, seemed like small hills. 

To the north-east, as far as the 
eye could reach, rose a multitude of 
sharply denned blue and purple peaks, 
the valleys between them, vast and 
filled with frightful ravines, seeming the 
merest gullies on the earth's surface. 
Farther off than this line of peaks 
rose the dim outlines of the Balsam 
and Smoky ranges. In the distant south- 
west, looking across into Georgia, we 
could descry "Mount Yonah," lonely and superb, with a cloud- wreath about 
his brow; sixty miles away, in South Carolina, a flash of sunlight revealed 
the roofs of the little German settlement of " Walhalla ; " and on the south- 
east, beyond the precipices and ragged projections, towered up " Chimney 
Top" mountain, while the "Hog Back" bent its ugly form against the sky, 
and " Cold " mountain rose on the left. ' Turning to the north, we beheld 
"Yellow" mountain, with its square sides, and "Short-Off." Beyond and 
beyond, peaks and peaks, and ravines and ravines ! It was like looking down 
on the world from a balloon. 

The wealthy citizens of South Carolina have long known of the charms of this 
section, and many of them annually visit it. In a few years its wildness will be 
tamed; a summer hotel will doubtless stand on the site of "Wright's" farm-house, 
and the lovely forests will be penetrated by carriage roads ; steps will be cut 
along the ribs of Whiteside ; and a shelter will be erected on the very summit. 
A storm on the vast rock, with the lightning playing hide and seek in the crevi- 
ces of the precipice, is an experience which gives one an enlarged idea of the 
powers of Heaven. 




Jonas sees the Abyss. 



502 A DANGEROUS PASS — DOWN THE TUCKASEEGE. 

There is one pass on Whiteside which, though eminently dangerous, is now 
and then essayed, and Jonas and one of the woodmen of our party resolved 
to try it. While we commoner mortals drank in the wonderful view, and hob- 
nobbed with the clouds, these adventurers climbed down the precipice's sides, 
and coming to a point not far from the Devil's Court- House, where the pass 
begins, launched themselves boldly forward. To gain a cave which is supposed 
in former times to have been the abode of an Indian sorcerer or medicine man, 
they were compelled to step out upon a narrow ledge running along the very side 
of the cliff, turning a corner with no support above or below. The ledge or path 
is, at its beginning, two feet wide, and as it nears the cavern, not more than 
eighteen inches in width. A single misstep or a failing of the nerves would 
have precipitated them a thousand feet into the valley, and above them the com- 
fortless rock rose 300 feet. Hugging the wall, and fairly flattening themselves 
against it, they calmly went forward and reached the cavern in safety. Return- 
ing, with their eyes blinded by the shadows of the rocky crevice, the demon of 
the abyss seized upon Jonas, and prompted him to look down. One glance, and 
the awful depths seemed to claim him. He shrank toward the wall, dug his finger- 
nails into the crevices, uttered a faint cry, looked up, and was saved. His com- 
panion, following imperturbably behind, did not trouble himself about the depths, 
and striding coolly forward, with his hand filled with mineral specimens, came out 
upon the plateau unmoved, while Jonas seemed to have seen spectres. 

From time to time "Indian ladders," — huge trunks of trees with the 
boughs so chopped off as to form steps, — have been found on Whiteside, indi- 
cating that the savages frequently visited the mountain, and the tradition that it 
was the scene of some of their superstitious rites seems well authenticated. Now- 
a-days a few young men wander about its hills and ravines, inspecting their 
bear-traps, and sometimes are fortunate enough to encounter a shaggy bruin, 
wallowing in moss or ensconced near a tree. 

At evening, as we reposed at Wright's, the thunder broke along the sky, and 
the lightning struck among the rocks .on the adjacent hills. The storm was 
mighty and beautiful ; a strange, rushing wind came with it, bending the forest 
growths like willows, and then the clouds covered the mountain top, and a fine 
mist fell. The sky was luminous, the lightning seeming to rend it in twain, and 
we were mute and frightened before the terrific grandeur of the battling 
elements. 

" Whiteside" stands near the extreme south-eastern border of Macon county. 
We descended from it down the Tuckaseege valley into Jackson. Through both 
these counties runs an extensive copper belt ; the ore in Jackson county being 
mainly bisulphuret or green carbonate of copper. In this region the advan- 
tages for the location of grazing-farms are superb, because the high mountains 
arrest the passing clouds, and condense them into rain so often that the lands 
are never parched or dry. Snow rarely lingers long there, and even in a hard 
winter the mountain herbage and ferns are readily made into hay. 



LVII. 

ASHEVILLE — THE FRENCH BROAD VALLEY — THE ASCENT OF 

MOUNT MITCHELL. 

ON a bright Sunday we descended toward the course of the Tuckaseege, 
and a violent storm delayed us at a lowly cabin, near the path by which 
a visitor now and then penetrates to Tuckaseege cataract. According to the 
custom of the country, we carried our saddles into the porch and sat down on 
them to talk with the residents. The tall, lean, sickly farmer, clad in a home- 
spun pair of trowsers and a flax shirt, with the omnipresent gray slouched hat, 
minus rim, drawn down over his forehead, courteously greeted us, and volun- 
teered to direct us to the falls, though he "was powerful afeard of snakes." 

Buttermilk and biscuit were served ; we conversed with the farmer on his 
condition. He cultivated a small farm, like most of the neighbors in moderate 
circumstances ; only grew corn enough for his own support ; " did n't reckon he 
should stay thar long ; war n't no schools, and he reckoned his children needed 
larnin' ; schools never was handy ; too many miles away." There was very little 
money in all the region round about ; farmers rarely saw fifty dollars in cash from 
year to year ; the few things which they needed from the outside world they got 
by barter. The children were, as a rule, mainly occupied in minding the innu- 
merous pigs about the cabin, and caring for the stock. The farmer thought 
sheep-raising would be " powerful peart," if folks had a little more capital to 
begin on ; thought a man might get well-to-do in a year or two by such invest- 
ment. 

He welcomed the mineral movement gladly; reckoned may be we could send 
him some one to buy his farm, and let him get to a more thickly settled region ; 
but seemed more cheerful when we suggested that emigrants might come in and 
settle up the country, bringing a demand for schools with them. " He reckoned 
there war n't no Ku-Klux these days ; never knew nothin' on 'em. Heerd 
nothin' furder from 'em sence the break-up." 

The housewife was smoking her corn-cob pipe, and sitting rather disconso- 
lately before the fire-place, warming her thin hands by the few coals remaining 
in the ashes. The rain dripped in through the roof, and the children were hud- 
dled mutely together where it could not reach them. The furnishings were, as 
everywhere among the poorer classes in the mountains, of the plainest character. 
But the log barns were amply provisioned ; stock looked well, and a few sheep 
and goats were amicably grouped under the shed. 

The rain had so submerged the country that we gave up a visit to the 
cataract, said to be superior to the two other falls we had seen ; and, as we rode 



504 



THE COPPER. REGION ASHEVILLE. 



on, there came a pause in the shower. Presently we overtook a party of mount- 
aineers going to church. The women, perched on the horses behind the men, 
peered curiously at us from beneath their large sun-bonnets, and the men talked 
cheerily. The church, which we passed, was ruder than Parson Caton's in Ten- 
nessee. It was merely a log-cabin, inside which benches were placed. The 
congregation was singing a quaint hymn as we rode by, and a few men, for whom 
there was no room inside, lounged near the saplings where their horses were 
hitched, listening intently. 

The copper region of Jackson county is fascinatingly beautiful. While there 
is the same tropical richness of foliage which distinguishes the other counties, 
there is a greater wealth of stream-side loveliness ; there are dozens of foamy 
creeks and by-ways, overhung with vines. 

The hills are admirably fertile in the vicinity of the Way-ye-hutta and Cul- 
lowhee copper mines, and many of the vineyards are exquisitely cultivated. 
The Cullowhee mountain is charming; no region in the South can furnish 
stronger attractions for emigrants. " Look at that valley," said an English 
resident to me, " a few farmers from England, with their system of small farms 
and careful cultivation, would make this an Eden." And he did not exaggerate. 








Asheville, North Carolina, from " Beaucatcher Knob." 

Give all that section immigration, and railroads cannot be kept out of it, even 
by the rascality of such gigantic swindles as have been forced upon North 
Carolina. The copper mines in Jackson were worked extensively before the 
war, and Northern capital and shrewd English mining experience are once more 
developing them. 

The ore is " hauled," as the North Carolinians say, more than forty miles 
over a wagon road. The Blue Ridge tracts and the lands in Jackson county 
demand the attention of such men as Joseph Arch and other English agitators of 
the agricultural revolution in Great Britain. Vast tracts of the lands in Western 
North Carolina can be sold to colonists or capitalists at from one to two dollars 
per acre. 

Some days later, the Judge enthusiastically pointed out to us the beauties 
of Asheville, the Mecca of the North Carolina mountaineer. We had journeyed 
thither down the valley of the Pigeon river, — a tranquil stream, with flour-mills 



THE ATTRACTIONS OF ASHEVILLE, 505 

here and there perched in cozy nooks along its banks. A thirty mile wagon 
ride from Waynesville landed us at the great white " Eagle Hotel," from whose 
doors the Asheville stages ply over all the roads west of the Blue Ridge. In the 
valley where Asheville lies the capricious "French Broad" receives into its noble 
channel the beautiful Swannanoa, pearl of North Carolinian rivers. 

Around the little city, which now boasts a population of 2,500 people, are 
grouped many noticeable hills; out of the valley of "Hommony" creek sombre 
Mount Pisgah rises like a frowning giant, and from the town the' distant summits, 
of the Balsam range may be faintly discerned. From " Beaucatcher Knob," the 
site of a Confederate fort, overhanging Asheville, the looker toward the south- 
west will see half-a-hundred peaks shooting skyward ; while in the foreground 
lies the oddly-shaped town, with the rich green fields along the French Broad 
beyond it. Asheville Court- House stands nearly 2,250 feet above the level of the 
sea ; and the climate of all the adjacent region is mild, dry, and full of salvation 
for consumptives. The hotels, and many of the cheery and comfortable farm- 
houses are in summer crowded with visitors from the East and West ; and the 
local society is charmingly cordial and agreeable. 

Buncombe county, of which Asheville is the central and chief town, was 
named after Colonel Edward Buncombe, a good revolutionary soldier and 
patriot; and its name has become familiar to us in the quaint saying so often used 
in the political world, " He's only talking for Buncombe," when a legislator is 
especially fervent in aid of some local project. At Asheville, we were once 
more in a region of wooden and brick houses, banks, hotels and streets ; and 
although still some distance from any railroad, felt as if we had a hold upon the 
outer world. 

Asheville has heretofore been comparatively unknown. Enthusiastic inva- 
lids, who there regained their health, have from time to time sung its charms, 
but the little town, situated 250 miles from the State capital, has only a fleeting 
fame. The war brought it now and then into notice ; General Stoneman, with 
his command, fought his way through the passes to Waynesville, and at a short 
distance from Asheville the last Confederate battle east of the Mississippi 
occurred. 

The town has grown steadily and remarkably since the war, and now has 
banks, good churches, well-furnished stores, three newspapers, and ample hotels ; 
while in the vicinity the tobacco which grows so abundantly in Buncombe is 
prepared for the market, and great quantities of cheese are annually manufac- 
tured. Beautiful natural parks surround it ; superb oaks cast their shadows on 
greenest of lawns, and noble maples, ash and walnuts border the romantic road- 
way. A few miles from the town's centre are excellent white sulphur springs, 
from which a variety of exquisite views are to be had, and only nine miles north 
of the town are the so-called "Million Springs," beautifully situated in a cave 
between two ranges of mountains, where sulphur and chalybeate waters may be 
had in profusion. 

The town of Asheville will in future be the railroad centre of Western North 
Carolina, and must grow to be a large and nourishing city. The present pov- 



506 



WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA RAILROADS. 



erty of the section as to railroad communication is largely due to the discour- 
agement consequent on the manner in which the confidence of those subscribing 
to the principal enterprise has been betrayed. The unfinished embankments, 
the half-built culverts and arches of the Western North Carolina railroad, which 
are to be seen in many of the western counties, are monuments to the rapacity 
and meanness of a few men in whom those counties placed confidence. 

The plan of this railroad is a fine one, and would soon develop the noble 
mountain country into a very wealthy section. It proposed to supply a route 
from Salisbury, North Carolina, to Asheville, and thence by two lines to give 
advantageous outlets. One of these was to run down the valley of the French 
Broad river to "Paint Rock," on the Tennessee line, connecting with the Cin- 
cinnati, Cumberland Gap, and Charleston railroad, leading to Morristown, Ten- 
nessee, which would have connections with the through route from New York 
to New Orleans, at Morristown, and would complete the great air line from 
Charleston, in South Carolina, to Cincinnati in Ohio, by connecting at Lexington 





View near Warm Springs, on the French Broad River. [Page 507.] 

or Paris, in Kentucky, with the Kentucky Central road. The other outlet was to 
be by the main line passing due west from Asheville through the western counties 
to Ducktown, in Cherokee county, and thence on to Cleveland in Tennessee, 
whence it is but a short distance to Chattanooga. Thus the gates of this now 
almost unknown region would be unlocked, and the best sections penetrated by 
rail routes. But the work lies incomplete under the very eyes of the hard-work- 
ing mountaineers who have been swindled. The money which they subscribed 
has been spirited away, and still the eastern division of the road has only reached 
Old Fort, twenty-five miles from Asheville. 

The other routes are few and insufficient. The "Central North Carolina," 
formerly the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherford railroad, is to run from Wil- 
mington on the coast via Wadesboro', Charlotte, and Lincolnton to Cherryville, 
and is intended to reach Asheville, but has eighty-five miles yet to build from 
Cherryville. 



ALONG THE FRENCH BROAD RIVER. $OJ 

The Union and Spartanburg railroad, leading from Alston, in South Carolina, 
to the Greenville and Columbia route, twenty-five miles north of Columbia, is to 
be extended to Asheville, a distance of seventy-four miles, crossing the Blue 
Ridge at Butt Mountain Gap; and the Laurens and Asheville Railroad Company 
intends to build a road from Laurensville via Greenville, in South Carolina, to 
Asheville, which will furnish a means of connection with the Atlanta and Rich- 
mond Air Line. 

The importance of the extension, which would give a through direct line from 
Cincinnati to Charleston, can hardly be overestimated. The links still to be 
built would develop not only a rich, but a wildly romantic and picturesque 
country. The valley of the French Broad river conforms with perfect accuracy 
to the general direction of an air line between the two cities. 

And what a valley it is ! The forty-four miles from Asheville to Wolf creek 
form one of the most delightful of mountain journeys. The rugged wagon road 
runs close to the river's banks all the way to Warm Springs, a charming watering- 
place a short distance from the Tennessee line. As you penetrate the valley the 
river grows more and more turbulent; its broad current now dashes into breakers 
and foam-flakes, as it beats against the myriads of rocks set in the channel-bed; 
now twirls and eddies around the masses of drift-wood washed down from the 
sides of the gigantic mountains which rise almost perpendicularly from the tiny 
stretches of sand at the water's edge; now, deep and black, or in stormy weather 
yellow and muddy, it flows in a strong, steady current beside banks where the 
trees are grouped in beautiful forms, creating foregrounds over which the artist's 
eye lovingly lingers. 

The Indians named the French Broad " the racing river ; " and, as it hurls its 
wavelets around the corner of some islet or promontory, one sees how faithfully 
the name describes the stream. Each separate drop of water seems to be racing 
with every other. A party of American hunters named the stream after their 
captain, French, during the days of early settlement, and from "French's Broad" 
the name finally assumed its present form. 

One can hear the voice of the river always crying among the cliffs, and moan- 
ing and sighing as it laps the low banks in the narrow gorge. It was the rare 
good fortune of our party to journey beside the stream during a terrific storm. 
As we reached the little town of Marshall, — a few white buildings grouped 
beneath immense cliffs, — a wild tempest of wind and rain, which snapped the 
locusts like paper twine, blew down oaks, made "land slides," and prostrated the 
crops, came through the valley ; and then the roar of the river was sublime. 

Straggling along in the storm, we gave ourselves completely up to the gran- 
deur of the occasion. The creeks which came down from the rocks were so 
swollen that they would have carried the stoutest horse out into the wild chaos 
of the dashing and leaping stream, and drowned him in the mysterious eddies. 

Night came, and we slept in a little farm-house, with the river singing its 
delicious songs of unrest and impatience at its mountain bounds in our ears. 
Skillful fording in the morning enabled us to pursue our journey along the 
washed-out road, where beetling; crags almost shut the light ; where there was 



508 



LOVERS LEAP WARM SPRINGS — PAINT ROCK. 



not room for two carriages abreast, and some stone monarch of the glen leaned 
toward the stream's edge as if just about to topple downward. For miles the 
rocks towered up loftily, and miniature torrents ran down their sides, rippling 
across the road into the river, upon whose farther bank there was no refuge what- 
ever; only the sheer rock with its coat- 
ing of foliage ; the tangled thickets on 
the height ; the gleam of the streamlet 
piercing its way athwart the stones 
1,500 feet in air ! 

The traveler who is not strongly 
moved by his first gaze upon this val- 
ley must be indeed blase. The ap- 
proaches to Warm Springs exceed in 
grandeur any other portion of the 
gorge. Pyramidal hills rise on either 
hand ; the soft breeze of the south 
brings perfume from the borders of 
little river lakes, where the current 
has set backward, and is held in place 
by banks covered with delicate flowers. 
Mountain Island," two miles from 
the Springs, is a hilly islet in the im- 
petuous stream; its shores and its 
slopes are rich in beauty, carpeted with 
evergreens, and all the colors of the 
rich North Carolinian flora. Below 
it the river becomes smooth, and moves majestically, only to break up anew into 
sparkling and fantastic cascades. Suddenly leaving the looming mountains, with 
the famous rock "Lover's Leap" on the right, one finds that the south-west 
bank of the river recedes, and gives place to a level plain, in whose centre is a 
beautiful grove. From this clump of trees peer out the white pillars of the 
Warm Springs Hotel. It is not far from the banks of the French Broad, which 
there is more than 400 feet wide, and traversed by a high bridge. 

The Warm Springs were discovered late in the last century by some advent- 
urous scouts, who had penetrated farther than was prudent into the then Indian 
country. The springs boil up from the margins of the river, and of " Spring 
Creek," and have a temperature of 105 degrees. Thither the rheumatic, and 
those afflicted with kindred diseases, repair yearly in large numbers, and find 
speedy relief. From a spacious lawn one can look up-river at massive cliffs 
and mountains clad in rich foliage; and for miles and miles around there is a 
succession of quaint and oddly shaped rocks. Nine miles beyond the Springs 
the railroad from Wolf creek gives prompt connection with the through line to 
New York. 

Five miles below, on the Tennessee line, is the "Paint Rock," 200 feet high, 
a titanic mass of stone whose face is marked as with red paint, and which seems 




Lover's Leap, French Broad River, Western 
North Carolina. 



'THE CHIMNEYS THE SWANNANOA. 



509 



to have been pounded by some terrible Thor-hammer into multitudinous frag- 
ments, some of which overhang the highway. Not far from this point one comes 
also to the " Chimneys," — the unpoetic name given to jagged stone monuments 
rising 400 feet into the air, serene, awful, gigantic, while the " racing river" cries 
and caracoles at their bases. Hundreds, nay, thousands of fragments, shaped like 
diamonds, or squares, of round flint and sandstone, and almost every other kind 
of stone, lie scattered below, as though hurled down by a thunderbolt; and 
swarms of turkey-buzzards hover in and out among the crags. 

Buncombe county is very fertile; the tobacco raised there has frequently 
taken the first and second premiums at the Virginia State fair. Fruit culture 
prospers ; iron ores crop out here and there. Stock-raising is one of the chief 
occupations of the wealthier residents. Beaufort harbor will be Asheville's 
nearest port, and a very convenient one, if ever the Western North Carolina rail- 
road is completed. Manufacturing is needed, and would find superior advan- 





View on the Swannanoa River, near Asheville, Western North Carolina. 

tages, in all the region round about Asheville. In the valley of the French 
Broad there are many admirable mill sites, the river at Asheville being quite as 
large as the Merrimac at Lowell, in Massachusetts. The water power is generally 
superb, because most of the mountain streams, before they flow out into Tennes- 
see, have a fall of 1,000 feet. Timber is abundant, and when the railroad comes, 
it will run through finely-timbered regions. 

Our journey along the Swannanoa was a revelation. We missed the noisy 
grandeur of the French Broad valley, but we found ample compensation in the 
quiet loveliness of the stream which the reverent Indian named "beautiful." 
Four miles from Asheville, going north-eastward, toward the Black mountains, 
we reached the river, and followed its placid current through a beautifully-culti- 
vated valley. A rich carpet of green covered its banks, and there was the same 
charming effect produced by the trailing of the vines over the trees which we 
had noticed in the mountains. 

33 



5io 



PATTON S 



•CLIMBING MOUNT MITCHELL. 




The river was sometimes deeply dark in color ; now and then faintly blue or 
purple, as the sunshine played upon it through the thickets ; here and there we 
came to a place where it had formed a little lake, across which a rustic bridge 
was thrown, and where one of the long, slender canoes of the country was 

moored to a sapling; now, where some 
rich farmer's mansion stood on a 
lawn, dotted with oaks and hickories ; 
now, where we caught a glimpse of 
the distant Potato Top mountain ; 
now, where an old mill was half 
hidden under clusters of azaleas and 
the low -laurels. 

The summit of the Black mount- 
ains is the highest point in the United 
States east of the Mississippi river, and 
the rugged range, clad in its garments 
of balsam and moss, glorious with its 
vistas of apparently endless hills and 
fancifully -shaped valleys, is the chief 
pride of the North Carolinian mount- 
aineer. Our party left Asheville late 
one bright morning, sped along the 
a good halting-point, seven or eight miles from 
the mountain's foot, and then pushed on to Patton's, the collection of humble 
cabins nestled at the very base of the chain of peaks. 0«r German companion 
sang his merriest songs that afternoon, and the Judge's cheery halloo was heard 
at every mile, for the loveliest phases of nature gave us their inspiration. 

As we approached Patton's, the long ridges of "Craggy" loomed up like 
.ramparts to the eastward, and the sun tinged the sky above them crimson and 
purple. The music from the ripples of the fork of the Swannanoa, which we 
-were now ascending, drifted on the evening air ; the kalmias, the azaleas, and the 
honeysuckles, sent forth their perfumes ; the wood-choppers, their feet well pro- 
tected against the snakes by stout boots, were strolling supperward, and gave us 
hearty good evenings; the cow-bells tinkled musically, and in a corner of Pat- 
ton's yard a mountain smith was clanging his hammer against his anvil, seemingly 
keeping time with the refrain to which all nature was moved. The evening was 
. still and warm, even in that elevated region. While some of us remained in the 
> cabin below and listened to tales of Black Mountain adventure, the aspiring 
Jonas, with a companion, pushed on a few miles beyond, that he might see sun- 
rise from the heights, even though he had to sleep in a crazy and decaying house 
on the edge of a dizzy cliff, with the floor for his bed and his saddle for a pillow. 
It is twelve miles from Patton's to the summit of Mitchell's Peak, and the 
ascent, which is very arduous, is usually broken by stop at the " Mountain 
House," four miles from the foot, and another at the point where the Govern- 
ment once maintained an observatory, on a rock 6,578 feet high, and three miles 



First Peep at Patton's. 

Swannanoa to "Alexander's,' 



AT THE 



MOUNTAIN HOUSE 



511 



from the topmost height, which rises suddenly from the range, a mass of ragged 
projections, covered with deadened tree-trunks. 

At early dawn we were on our road to the Mountain House, at first through 
thickets, then along a creek-bed, where the cautious mountain-horses walked with 
the greatest difficulty ; now fording a creek twenty times in half an hour, now 
bending as we came to tree- trunks half- fallen across the trail. A slip upon a 
smooth stone frightened one of the horses so that he stood still and trembled 
for a moment, so well did he realize the result of a fall or roll backward ; some- 
times the animals would stand and listen, with their ears ominously cocked as 
if watching for snakes ; often they paused as if in mute despair at the task 
before them. 

But after an hour and a-half of this laborious climbing, during which we 
had ascended at least 1,500 feet, we heard the halloo of Jonas and his compan- 
ions, and scrambling up the track of a little water-course, came out upon the 
plateau on whose edge stands the Mountain House. 

The " house " is a small Swiss cottage, once solidly built of stout beams, but 
now fast decaying. \t was built by William Patton, a wealthy citizen of Charles- 
ton, and before the war was often the resort of gay parties, who dined merrily on 
the cliff's verge, and saluted the sunset with champagne. It stands but a few 
yards from the edge of the Balsam growth, where the vegetation changes and the 
atmosphere is rarer than below. It is 5,460 feet above the sea-level at the 
point in front of the 
Mountain House, where one 
looks down into the valley, 
and sees the forest-clad 
ridges creeping below him 
for miles ; notes the twin 
peaks of Craggy and their 
naked tops; then turns 
in wonder to the wood 
above him, and searches 
in vain for the peaks be- 
yond. While at the win- 
dows of the Mountain 
House we seemed to be 
gazing from mid-air down 
upon the Blue Ridge. 
The illusion was perfect. 
Below us the mists were 
rising solemnly and slowly; 
peak after peak was unveil- 
ed ; vast horizons dawned 
upon us ; we seemed to 
have risen above the world. We turned from this view of the valleys and 
entered the balsam thickets, pushing eagerly forward to Mount Mitchell. 




The "Mountain House," on the way to Mount Mitchell's Summit. 



512 



THE OUTLOOK FROM MOUNT MITCHELL. 



And now we came into the region of the pink and scarlet rhododendrons. 
Whenever there was an opening in the trees the hill-side was aflame with 
them. Masses of their stout bushes hung along our path, and showered the 
fragile red blossoms upon us. The white mountain laurel, too, was omni- 
present, but the scarlet banner usurped the greatest space. 

When we came to a narrow trail, where slippery rocks confronted us, and 
ragged balsam-trunks compelled us to clamber over dangerous crags, we 
found the way strewn with 




1 



a crimson carpet after our 
horses had struggled 
through. Here, too, were 
masses of evergreen, and 
red -pointed mosses, and 
the azaleas again along 
the border of streamlets, 
and purple rosebay and 
the tall grasses in the clear- 
ings, in whose midst nes- 
tled timorously tiny white 
blossoms and ground 
berries. 

To climb Vesuvius is 
no more difficult than to 
scale the Black mountain, 
for although one can reach the very top of 
the latter on horseback, he is in constant 
danger of breaking his limbs and those of his 
horse on the rough pathway. By the time 
we had reached "Mount Mitchell" and seated 
ourselves upon its rocks, our horses were as 
thoroughly enthusiastic as we were, and peered 
out over the crags with genuine curiosity. 

From Mount Mitchell we saw that we 
were upon a centre from whence radiated several mountain chains. 
To the south we could see even as far as the Cumberland line, and 
could readily discern the " Bald " mountain and our old friend 
the Smoky; while nearer in the same direction, we noted the Bal- 
sam range. Sweeping inward from the north-east coast were the long ridges of 
the Alleghanies; on the north the chain of the Black culminated in a fantastic 
rock pile ; while on the south the ridges of Craggy once more stood revealed. 

To the east we could overlook the plains of North and South Carolina ; on 
the north-east we saw Table Rock and the "Hawk Bill," twin mountains, piercing 
the clouds; while beyond them rose the abrupt "Grandfather" mountain, and 
the bluff of the Roan. On the south were the high peaks of the Alleghanies, the 
Pinnacles, Rocky Knob, Gray Beard, Bear Wallow, and Sugar Loaf. 




View of Mount Mitchell 



MITCHELLS HIGH PEAK. 



513 



Another hour and a-half of climbing; then, dashing through a clearing, we 
suddenly saw above us a crag 200 feet high, with a stone-strewn path leading up 
it. Our horses sprang to their risky task ; they rushed up the ascent, — slipped, 
caught against the edges of the stones, snorted with fear, then laid back their 
ears and gave a final leap, and we were on Mitchell's high peak, utterly above 
Alleghanies, Blue Ridge, or Mount Washington. Our horses' ears brushed the 
clouds. In a few moments we were at Mitchell's grave. 

Here we were above the rhododendrons, and only a gnarled and stunted 
growth sprang up. The trees were nearly all dead ; those still alive seemed 
lonely and miserable. The rude grave of the explorer, with the four rough 
slabs placed around it, recalled the history of the man, and the origin of the 
peak's name. 

The Rev. Dr. Elisha Mitchell, a native of Connecticut, graduate of Yale 
and an eminent professor in the University of North Carolina, established the 




The Judge climbing Mitchell's High Peak. 

fact by measurements, made from 1835 to l8 44> tnat ^ e Black was the highest 
range east of the Rocky mountains in the United States." He grew very much 
to love the work of studying these heights, and spent weeks in wandering alone 
among them. The rough mountaineers learned to revere him, and he became 
as skillful a woodsman as any of them. 

In June of 1857, after accomplishing some difficult surveys, and, as it is 
supposed, having ascended the pinnacle which now bears his name, he was 
descending into Yancey county, when, overtaken by night and a blinding storm, 



5H THE GRAVE OF DR. MITCHELL. 

he strayed over a precipice on "Sugar Camp" creek, and was discovered some 
days afterward, dead, at the bottom of a waterfall, his body perfectly preserved 
in the limpid pool. His friends the mountaineers, who mourned his loss bitterly, 
buried him in Asheville; but a year later his remains were carried to the mount- 
ain top and there placed in a grave among the rocks he had loved so well. 

Near the grave the Government has established a signal-house, where two 
brave fellows dare the storms which occur almost daily. The anger of the 
heavens, as witnessed from this stony perch in mid-air, is frightful to contem- 
plate, and many a day the lonely men have expected to see their only shelter 
hurled down into the ravines below. 

The view from the topmost peak is similar, in most respects, to that from 
lower Mount Mitchell ; but the effect is more grand and imposing, and the 
mountains to the soath and east seem to stand out in bolder relief. A tremu- 




flBN 

Signal -Station and "Mitchell's Grave," Summit of the Black Mountains. 

lous mist from time to time hung about us; the clouds now and then shut the 
lower world from our vision, and we seemed standing on a narrow precipice, 
toward whose edges we dared not venture. 

As we descended, that afternoon, the pheasant strutted across our path ; the 
cross-bill turned his head archly to look at us ; the mountain boomer nervously 
skipped from tree to tree ; the rocks seemed ablaze as we approached the 
rhododendron thickets ; the brooks rippled never so musically, and the azalea's 
perfume was sweeter than ever before. 

Each member of the party, dropping bridle-rein on his weary horse's neck, 
as we came once more into the open space where stands the " Mountain House," 
and looked down thousands of feet into the yawning valley ; as the peace and 
silence, and eternal grandeur of the scene ripened in his soul, . involuntarily bared 
his head in reverence. Goethe was right : 

"On every height there lies repose." 



LVIII. 

THE SOUTH CAROLINA MOUNTAINS — THE CASCADES AND 
PEAKS OF NORTHERN GEORGIA. 

THE new link in the New York and New Orleans Air Line, connecting 
Charlotte in North Carolina with Augusta in Georgia, had been finished 
but a few days when I passed over it. This road, which gives the most direct 
route from Atlanta to Richmond, opens up a large portion of North-eastern 
Georgia, and traverses a rich mineral region for 600 miles. 

The country between Charlotte and Greenville in South Carolina is inter- 
esting, though still in the rough. The better class of people all through this 
section, and especially in North Carolina, possess and manifest that boldness and 
independence of spirit which made the colony the first of the original thirteen 
to claim independence, and prompted the settlers on the Cape Fear river to 
refuse a landing to the stamps brought from England in one of King George's 
sloops-of-war. There is a good deal of ignorance and prejudice among the low 
class of whites; they are hardly the stuff out of which the old heroes were 
made. 

The mountain region of South Carolina, lying between North Carolina and 
Georgia, contains some of the most exquisite scenery in the United States. 
Entering it from Charlotte, one passes Spartanburg and near the site of .the 
famous battle of King's Mountain, and following the Air Line may pause at 
the busy town of Greenville. 

I found there more activity and less embarrassment on account of the dis- 
tressing political situation than anywhere else in South Carolina south of Colum- 
bia, the State capital. The negroes were far less ignorant than their fellows of 
the coast and the central counties, and were disposed to be more reasonable 
in their political views. It is true that, after the war the Ku-Klux organiza- 
tion committed abominable outrages throughout York, Union, Spartanburg, 
Laurens and Chester counties. It was shown, at the time of the exposure 
consequent on the military arrests, that 2,000 male citizens of a single county 
belonged to the Ku-Klux, and actively participated in the coercive measures 
which it had foolishly adopted. 

But the mountaineers have learned the folly of such attempts, and there 
are no longer any reports of whippings and midnight massacres. The rail- 
road and the advent of Northern men here and there, as well as the impetus 
which the universal use of the new fertilizers has given to the production of cot- 
ton upon lands where, before the war, it would not have been deemed wise to 
plant it — all have aided in building up new feeling, and in banishing most 



5i6 



THE 



BLUE RIDGE RAILROAD. 



of the old bitterness. Had it not been for the supreme rascality of the hybrid 
State Government, the citizens of this upland region might have possessed 
even more railroad facilities than they at present enjoy. The "Blue Ridge" 
route was intended as a railroad into Kentucky and Tennessee, running 
across the southern end of the Blue Ridge, in South Carolina, which latter 
State and the city of Charleston owned nearly all the stock in the road up to 1871. 
After about $3,000,000 had been expended in the construction of a oortion 
of the road, and the State had guaranteed $4,000,000 of bonds, in support of fur- 




The Lookers-on at the Greenville Fair. [ Page 517.] 



ther construction, upon certain conditions intended to protect its own interests, a 
gigantic fraud was consummated. The " sinking fund commission," composed of 
the State officers, self-appointed, passed the railroad into the hands of a corpora- 
tion, robbing the State of its interest in the work, and then secured a legislative 
enactment annulling the conditions on which depended the issue of the four mil- 
lions in bonds. 



GREENVILLE, S.C. — ITS FAIR C OTTO N -PL ANT IN G . $1/ 

In addition to this, the Legislature authorized a further issue of " Blue Ridge" 
scrip to the amount of $1,800,000, and made it available by declaring it re- 
ceivable for taxes. This afforded "operators" the chance they desired for 
plundering the State treasury ; and meantime the Blue Ridge railroad remains 
unfinished. 

It was late in the autumn when I reached Greenville, but the weather was 
warm and delightful. The small planters from all the country round were crowd- 
ing the roads with their mule-carts, laden with one, two, or three bales of cotton. 
The agents for the sale of fertilizers were busy in the town looking after their 
interests, for many a planter had given them a lien upon his crop, and they 
wished to claim their money when the crop was brought to market. 

There was a variety of testimony as to the profit made by the cotton-raisers 
who only planted two or three acres each ; some insisted that they made hand- 
some profits, others that, after they had paid for their fertilizers, and their own 
support during the year, they usually had nothing left. The "lien " which the 
seller of phosphate takes, when he delivers a ton of the coveted stimulating 
substance to the farmer, is a formidable document. It engages not only the 
growing crop, but in many cases the household goods, if the crop fails, and 
sometimes the unlucky wight who has a poor crop on his few acres finds himself 
in danger of a practical eviction. 

But a good crop puts money and prosperity into this section, where the peo- 
ple are altogether better off than in the lowlands. They have every facility for 
enriching themselves, as soon as they can and will diversify the culture of their 
farms; and I noticed with pleasure the introduction of the "Agricultural fair" as 
a means of creating ambition in the direction of thorough farm culture. Green- 
ville held its first fair of the kind during my stay there. 

All along the highways leading into Greenville cotton whitened the fields ; 
although it was late in November, there were immense fields yet to pick ; and 
I was told that the whole crop is often not all picked before the advent of the 
spring months. The bareheaded negroes were lazily pulling at the white fleeces, 
wherever we passed, but seemed animated by no desire for results ; it was easy 
to see why the crop was not all gathered before spring. Emigrants from other 
States would find every chance for enriching themselves in these charming 
uplands, where the climate is so delicious ; where the streams and the hills are so 
beautiful, and where the soil is so fertile. 

Greenville lies at the base of the Saluda, near the Paris mountain, and is 
delightfully situated on a range of breezy hills. Summer visitors from the low- 
lands crowd its hotels and private mansions ; it has, like its neighbor, Spartan- 
burg, a number of excellent schools and colleges, and a university. It is near 
the source of the Reedy river, and the approaches to it from Columbia are along 
the banks of that lovely stream, the Saluda. To the eastward, daintily enshrined 
in a nook in the Blue Ridge, near the North Carolina frontier, lies Walhalla, a 
German settlement, where the vine is cultivated with rare success ; the county 
of Pickens is rich in mountain outlooks and noble waterfalls ; and not more than 
twenty miles from Greenville, that superb monarch of the glens, Table mountain, 



5 i8 



MOUNTAIN SCENERY. 




with its ledges, each a thousand feet high, rises in rocky grandeur to the height 
of 4,300 feet above sea-level. 

From the Greenville post-office, the stage-coach will speedily convey one into 
the heart of the Swannanoa and French Broad valleys in North Carolina. The 
road to Asheville leads through Saluda Gap, and past the beautiful summer 
resort, once the refuge of so many wealthy lowlanders, "Flat Rock." This was 
a species of Saratoga for the South Carolinians, and in the sweet valley there are 
still some noble mansions, like those of the Draytons and Memmingers, sur- 
rounded by gardens filled with rarest and costliest of shrubbery and flowers. 
Another route from Greenville leads to " Caesar's Head," a lofty mountain like 
the "Whiteside," and a trysting place for hundreds of merry pilgrims during 
summer months. 

Along the road, between Greenville and Asheville, and the rugged yet 
delightful routes which lead from Asheville to Charlotte, lies one of the great 

ss ^ s ^^^^ i ^^^ pleasure regions of the future. The 

falls of Slicking, at the base of the 
Table mountain, the banks of that 
prince among mountain streams, the 
wonderful Keowee, the sweet yale of 
Jocasse, and the adjacent Whitewater 
cataracts, vie with Mount Yonah, 
Tallulah, Toccoa, and Nacoochee, their 
Georgian neighbors, in variety and 
surprising beauty. 

From Charlotte to Centreville the 
scenery is sublimely beautiful. By 
this route one passes through the 
Hickory Nut Gap, a grand gorge in 
the Blue Ridge, through which a creek 
flows until its waters are merged in 
those of the rocky Broad river. Where 
the latter stream forces its passage 
through a spur of the Blue Ridge, 
its bed is encumbered with myriads 
of rocks, rooted deeply in the almost 
unyielding soil ; mountain bluffs hem it in ; the scene is one of fearful solitude 
and grandeur. The Gap is hardly anywhere more than half a mile wide, and, 
seen from a little distance, it seems but a narrow path cut between gigantic 
buttresses of stone, which rise 2,500 feet. 

Midway up the front of the highest bluff, on the south side of the Gap, 
stands an isolated rock resembling some antique and weather-beaten castle turret. 
The rains of thousands of years have washed the granite cliffs smooth, and one 
may fancy them the walls of some huge fortification. Shooting out over the 
cliff, and falling into some as yet undiscovered pool, a spray-stream comes 
pouring; and near the base of the awful precipice are three violent and capricious 




Table Mountain — South Carolina. 



HICKORY NUT GAP NORTH-EASTERN GEORGIA. 519 

cascades, which, by centuries of persistence, have worn wells from forty to fifty 
feet deep in the hard stone beneath them. When one approaches the Gap, he 
sees before him nothing but the limitless ocean of peaks, pointed sharply, like 
the apexes of waves, against the crystal vault of the sky. Everywhere Nature 
seems to have thrown out barriers, and to have determined to prevent one from 
entering her favorite retreat. 

Then suddenly one comes upon the narrow defile of the " Hickory Nut 
Gap." 

Beyond it, penetrating to Rutherfordton, one sees the sublime sentinels of the 
Blue Ridge range jealously guarding the approaches, and at last reaches a point 
whence the panorama of the Pinnacle, and Sugar Loaf, and Chimney Rock, and 
Tryon mountains all burst at once upon the vision. The road thither winds 
along a ravine-side ; steep rocks overhang it, and beneath it a rushing torrent 
screams its warning. An opening in the forest shows anew the vast expanse 
of peaks, and in their midst the Monarch, the Cloud-piercer, the sombre con- 
troller of the whole magic realm, Mitchell's high peak ! 

Miles away, to the westward, one can dimly discern a silver line on a faintly 
defined mountain : it is a torrent leaping down the almost perpendicular sides of 
its parent height. 

Southward from Greenville toward Atlanta, the Air Line road runs through 
the forests of Northern Georgia. I found many small towns, built of rough 
planks, growing briskly in the forest clearings. The railway station and a 
long platform, a store, a few plain houses, with fat hogs rooting among the 
stumps in their immediate neighborhood, a carpenter's shop, and, possibly, 
some small and primitive manufactory, made up each of these "towns." The 
hotels were two-story wooden buildings, through whose thin walls came the 
keen autumn winds, and whose slender partitions allowed one to hear every 
movement and tone of voice of all his adjacent fellow-sleepers. 

The fifteen counties of North-eastern Georgia cover a territory of 7,000 square 
miles, traversed here and there by the Appalachian chain, which, leaving North 
Carolina on its western boundary, pushes into hundreds of spurs and outliers 
which shape the romantic scenery of Rabun, Habersham, Towne, Union, White, 
Fannin, Gilmer, and Lumpkin counties. There, in valleys elevated nearly 2,000 
feet above the sea-level, are rivers and rivulets upon whose courses some of the 
most majestic cascades on the continent are found. Attracted by the fame of 
those noble waterfalls, Toccoa and Tallulah, I left the line of rail, and with a 
friendly company, wandered in and out among the peaks and ravines for several 
days. 

Rabun Gap is the passage from Western North Carolina, through the Blue 
Ridge, into the Georgia gold and iron field. Rabun county itself is one succes- 
sion of dark blue giant ridges, over which, descending gradually, one reaches the 
little town of Clayton. The populations in the mountains along the border 
devote some attention to illicit distilling, and are, consequently, a little suspicious 
of strangers who penetrate to their fastnesses. A worthy clergyman from the 
lower counties was journeying peacefully on a religious errand to the neighboring 



520 



RABUN GAP CLAYTON. 



State, through the passes of Rabun, shortly before our visit, when he suddenly, 
one day, saw thirteen guns pointed at him by as many men, and had to dis- 
mount and prove, at the rifles' muzzles, that he was not a revenue officer. 

From "Whiteside," in North Carolina, to Rabun Gap, it is only forty-five or 
fifty miles on an air line, but the detours through' the ravines make it farther 
to the traveler. When one arrives at Clayton he feels much as if he had left the 
world behind him. The quaint hamlet lies in a valley encircled with mountains. 
As you enter, you have that feeling of being imprisoned and of desire to escape, 

so common to the wanderer 
among the Alleghanies and on 
the Blue Ridge. There seems no 
possible outlet; the town appears 
to have been conveyed there by 
enchantment ; yet a little careful 
observation will show you the 




"Let us address de Almighty wid pra'r." [Page 521.] 

roads piercing the passes in the valleys. Not far from Clayton are the falls of 
the Estatoia, or, as the mountaineers call them, " Rabun Falls," where a succes- 
sion of brilliant cascades plunge down the chasm in a mountain-side. Clam- 
bering to the top of this natural stairway in the rocks, one may obtain an 
outlook over the valley of the Tennessee, miles beyond Clayton, and may note 
the mountain billows rolling away, apparently innumerable, until the eye tires 
of the immensity! 

I have had occasion to describe the mountain "hack" to you — a red wagon 
mounted on super-fragile springs, and graced with seats, which, at every start 
made by the horses, bid fair to leave the vehicle. In such a conveyance, behind 
two splendid horses, did we depart from one of the forest towns on the Air Line 



A NEGRO MEETING. 



521 



railway one morning in mid-October, and climb the red hills of Northern 
Georgia. Mile after mile we journeyed through lands which might be made 
very valuable by a year or two of careful culture, by plantations or farms whose 
owners had deserted them, or tracts which the old settlers, having adopted the 




. 



Mount Yonah, as seen from Clarksville, Georgia. [Page 522.] 

new labor system, were putting into most wonderful order ; now dashed over firm 
roads, through stretches of dreary forest, where battalions of black-jacks guarded 
the solemn way ; and now along mountain-sides, where paths were narrow and 
ravines were on either hand. 

A few miles from the little hill-town of Clarksville, whither we were journey- 
ing, we came upon a large assembly Of negroes in a high, open field, backed by 
a noble uplift of mountains in the distance. It was Sunday afternoon, and the 
dusky citizens were returning to their devotions, the scene of which was a log- 
cabin, inhabited by a negro, whom we judged to be the neighborhood blacksmith, 
as a shop near by was encumbered with wheels and old iron. 

As we approached the " bars " leading into the meadow, the mass of the 
negroes had gathered inside and outside the cabin, and were singing a wild 
hymn, marked with that peculiar monotonous refrain which distinguishes all 
their music. Nothing could have been more picturesque than this grouping of 
swart and gayly-costumed peasantry, disposed around the humble cabin, with 
the afternoon sun glistening on their upturned faces. The noble peaks in the 
far background, mysterious in their garments of subtle blue, and inspiring 
in their majesty, added deliciously to the effect of the whole. 

As the singers became excited, their bodies moved rhythmically, and cling- 
ing to each other's hands, they seemed about breaking into the passionate 
warmth of some barbaric ceremony. But our momentary fears of barbarism 
were checked when we heard the cracked voice of the venerable pastor, and 
saw the assembly kneel, and bow their heads at the words — 
"Let us address de Almighty wid pra'r." 

While the minister was praying, the young negroes who, during the sing- 
ing, had been disporting near a neighboring brook, left off their pranks, and 
hastened to join the kneeling throng about the cabin. As we drove away we 



52: 



CLARKSVILLE NACOOCHEE VALLEY. 



i 



could hear the solemn pleading of the ebony Jacob as he wrestled with the 
angel of prayer, and the nervous responses of the brethren and sisters when 
their souls took fire from the inspiration of the moment. 

_■__-_. ..-^ r — _,_ _ From Clarksville, pleasant sum- 



mer resort of the citizens of Sav- 
annah and other land towns, we 
caught a new glimpse of Mount 
Yonah, that lonely monarch of the 
northern counties. The village is 
small and quiet ; there are few 
farm-houses in the immediate vicin- 
ity ; there is no bustle of trade, 
no railroad, and no prospect of 
one. Seven miles away the new 
Air Line gives communication with 
the outer world. Habersham 
county, of which Clarksville is the 
county seat, was laid out by the 
famous "lottery act" of 1818, and 
has in it many valuable lands adapt- 
ed to the raising of wheat and corn. 
A ride from Clarksville to the 
valley of Nacoochee, which com- 
prises within its limits a series of 
the most exquisite landscapes in 
the world, is one of the charming 
specimens of this mountain journey. 
There a gentleman who has for- 
saken the lowlands has built a 
grand mansion with conservatories, 
lawns, and parterres; there he and 
his visitors strike terror into the 
hearts of the mountain trout, and 
wander over the peaks and down 
the valleys at their will. Mount 
Yonah's summit affords beautiful 
glimpses of a wide expanse, cov- 
ered with rich farms — for the 
Nacoochee valley is fertile, and its 
vicinity is thickly settled. 

The other visitors at Clarksville 
considered us aristocracts because 
we maintained the dignity of a red wagon on our journey to Tallulah Falls. 
They had usually accomplished the route in the somewhat fatiguing but cautious 
ox-cart. The famous falls, unquestionably among the grandest objects of natural 





it#^: 




The "Grand Chasm," Tugaloo River, Northern Georgia. 
[Page 524.] 



TALLULAH FALLS IN NORTHERN GEORGIA. 523 

scenery in America, are thirteen miles from Clarksville, and a portion of the 
journey lies over a new road through the forest, which I may safely condemn 
as execrable. 

On the border of a vast rent in the hills stands a little hotel built of pine 
boards. From its verandas you look up at ravine-sides of solid brown stone ; 
down into leaping and foaming rapids, which seem singing war songs; over the 
tops of swaying pines, which, in the rich moonlight of a delicious autumn even- 
ing, stand out, black and frightful, like spectres; and along paths cut in the steep 
descents, leading to rocky projections and treacherous knolls. 

These falls were named by the Cherokees, who called them Tarrurah or Tal- 
lulah — "the terrible." The stream in which they are formed is the western 
branch of the Tugaloo river, and the rapids are, perhaps, ten miles from its 
junction with the Chattooga. For more than a mile the impetuous stream passes 
through a ridge of mountains, with awful parapets of stone piled upon either 
side, and finally rattles away through the " Grand Chasm." 

The rocky banks are in some places five hundred, in others not more than 
two hundred feet high; their bases are worn into fantastic and grotesque forms by 
the action of the dashing waters; and the stream, at no point very wide, breaks 
into four cataracts, which vary from fifty to eighty feet in height, and into many 
others from twenty to thirty. From the highest points on the cliffs to the bot- 
tom of the river-bed, at one or two localities, the depth is nearly 1,000 feet; and 
the spectator, dizzy and awe-struck, can but do as we did — look once, and turn 
his frightened and bewildered eyes away ! 

The "Lodore," the " Tempestia," the "Oceana," and the "Serpentine," are 
the names given to the four principal falls. The third fall, sometimes called the 
" Hurricane," is the most remarkable and interesting. Climbing to a rock 
directly overhanging it, and beneath which the waters are breaking across irreg- 
ular shelving masses of stone, and foaming and dancing in passion in a whirlpool 
eighty feet below, one may gaze down stream to the sortie from the canon. 

There the whole valley seems to pitch violently forward, as if it were the 
entrance to Avernus ; its rocky sides are mottled with lichens and the beautiful 
colt's-foot; and on the crests of the cliffs flourish pines, hemlocks, masses of 
ferns, and a profusion of grays and browns which no painter's brush can repro- 
duce. Many trees lean as if looking shudderingly, and drawn involuntarily, 
toward the abyss. Beyond is a sheer precipice draped in hemlocks only, and 
still beyond, a projection which, when I saw it, was ablaze with the strong autumn 
colors of the leaves, red, and scarlet, and yellow, above which runs up a hundred 
and fifty feet of naked, glittering rock, towering tremendously above the tallest 
trees, and standing in giant relief against the sky. 

Coming back to the banks near the " Hurricane " fall, we noticed that the 
ledges bent downward in three or four immense layers of dark flint, and that 
grasses grew over them, like strange beards upon monsters' faces. Here and 
there an old white tree-trunk hung tottering on the ravine's edges. The descent 
to this fall is down a gully almost perpendicular in steepness ; one is also com- 
pelled to pass through the " Needle's Eye," a low passage beneath rocks, and 



524 



THE CASCADES THE "GRAND CHASM." 



the " Post-office," where it was once the custom for the hundreds of visitors to 

write their names upon the smooth walls of a cave. 

The cascades themselves are not so remarkable as the scenery around them. 

The rocks and the precipices are so gigantic that the stream seems but a silvery 

thread among them. 
Seen from the dizzy 
height known as "The 
Devil's Pulpit," or "The 
Lover's Leap," the cas- 
cades are like tiny lace 
veils, spread in the val- 
ley, or like frostbeds, 
such as one sees on 
meadows in the morn- 
ing. 

The effect of a so- 
journ among the rocks 
at Lover's Leap at 
night, when the moon- 
light is brilliant, is mag- 
ical. Far below you the 
valley seems sheathed 
in molten silver; the 
song of the cascades is 
borne, now fiercely, 
now gently, to your 
ears by the varying 
breezes; while you 
grovel among the slip- 
pery pine and hemlock 
sprays and twigs, cling- 
ing to a rock, which 
is your only protec- 
tion against a fall of a 
thousand feet down to 
the jagged peaks below. 
At the "Grand 
Chasm," which is prop- 
erly the end of the 
ravine, where the 
stream, free from its 
barriers, becomes tran- 
quil, — after it has 
fought its way around the base of a mountain of dark" granite, — the formation 
of rock changes. There are no more of the slanting shelves, of the Avernus 




Toccoa I 1 all 



TOCCOA MINERAL WEALTH. 525 

gates ; but instead, there are rounded battlements, which, sloping and yielding, 
end in a ragged hill-side, strewn with bowlders, with blackened hemlocks, and 
with tree-trunks prone, as if waiting for some landslide to hurl them into the 
stream. 

On the right looms up another cliff, with a slope like that of walls rising from 
a castle- moat; this is thatched with foliage ; hemlocks straggle along its summit; 
and in the recesses of the thickets which' stretch in all directions from it, the 
holly spreads its thorny leaves, and the laurel its pendants. 

Finally the stream is lost to view and flows under rocks, through a sym- 
metrical gap half a mile away, — beyond which one can see a succession of 
peaks, whose heads are wrapped in cloud. 

After " Tallulah," the falls of Toccoa, a single spray jet, falling one 
hundred and eighty- five feet, over a shelving rock, is a relief. Seated in a 
quiet and forest-enshrouded valley, through which Toccoa creek runs, one 
can look up to the pouring waters with a sense of admiration, but without 
the awe inspired by the chasms and cascades of "The Terrible." Toccoa is 
situated near Toccoa City, an ambitious fledgling town on the Air Line 
railroad, and thousands of visitors yearly watch its tremendous leap from the 
crag, around which a steep road winds along the ascents that conduct to 
"Tallulah." 

The copper region of Northern Georgia is a continuation of the remarkable 
one in Eastern Tennessee. A vein of copper seventeen feet thick has been found 
in one of the counties. In Fannin county there are large bodies of marble, and 
there is an iron-field on the southern slopes of the Iron mountain range. A 
great deal has been said about the gold mines in the northern counties. There 
are, no doubt, extensive deposits there. The mines in the Nacoochee valley, 
when first worked, on a very small scale, and with rude machinery, yielded from 
$2,000 to $3,000 to each workman yearly ; and several millions of dollars have 
been obtained from the deposits since 1828. The Loud, Sprague, and Lewis 
mines, in the vicinity of Nacoochee, are believed to be exceptionally rich. In 
Rabun, Habersham, Carroll, and White counties there are known to be extensive 
deposits. In the Nacoochee valley immense works for carrying out the Califor- 
nia hydraulic process were erected before the war ; but have since that time been 
only feebly worked. 

In the section between the Tray and Yonah mountains some few diamonds 
have from time to time been found. Not far from this point are the head-waters 
of the Tennessee, which, passing through Rabun Gap, plunge downward through 
the Appalachian, the Smoky, the Chilhowee, and Cumberland ranges, until, 
merged in a broad and noble stream, they enter the fertile fields of Tennessee 
and Alabama. There, too, the Savannah rises; there the waters of the rain- 
storm divide, and flow in separate directions in the channels of the two mighty 
rivers. It is said that several good gold mines in Hall county have been opened, 
and worked as low as the water-level, and that they pay a small but steady 
profit. In Hall county is also situated the " Harris Lode," a notable silver mine; 
and in the neighboring divisions of Lumpkin, Forsyth and Clarke, topaz, 
34 



526 



AN AGRICULTURAL EXAMPLE NEEDED, 



amethysts, beryl, gold, plumbago, iron, granite, and gneiss have been found.* 
In Clarke county, where the Georgia University is located, there is remarkable 
water power, and some cotton and woolen factories have been erected. 

This mountain region, so rich in resource, has been as yet but little developed. 
With the completion of the railroad system, which is very comprehensive, and 
puts almost every county within easy reach of markets, the more enterprising of 
the present residents think that new population and new methods of agriculture 
will come in. 

The valley lands now readily yield twenty to thirty bushels of corn and fifteen 
of wheat to the acre, without manures, and with no culture of consequence ; deep 
ploughing and rotation of crops would treble these amounts. The local farmers 
need the example of Northern agriculture before their eyes. With lands which 
will produce infinitely finer and larger crops of clover and timothy than 
those of Massachusetts, they still send to the Bay State for their hay. But living 
is cheaper than in the Western States, game is plentiful, and good land, 
"improved" in the Georgia sense, is to be had at reasonable prices. 

*At Dahlonega, in Lumpkin county, a pretty town commanding fine mountain views, the 
United States has a branch mint, and gold mines are quite extensively worked in the vicinity. 




A Mail-Carrier. 



LIX. 



CHATTANOOGA, THE GATEWAY OF THE SOUTH. 

AT a little distance from the locality known as Bird's Mill, not far from 
the boundary line between Tennessee and Georgia, and within the limits 
of the former State, there stands, among tangled underbrush, a massive yet 
simple monument. Around it the envious brier has crept, and the humbler 
headstones which here and there dot the thicket are also hedged about with 





Mission Ridge, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. [Page 528.] 

weeds and creepers. Neglect and oblivion seem, to the hasty observer, to have 
so effectually covered the spot with their wings, that even the dwellers in the 
neighborhood hardly know whom or what the marble and the stone represent. 
Yet these obscure memorials call to mind some of the most touching and 
remarkable episodes in our history as a nation. They point backward, through 
the miraculous years of the last half century, to the time when the Cherokees held 
all the country about them ; to the time of the mission-schools, and the heroic 
efforts of the "American Board" to establish them. A weather-beaten inscription 
on the marble monument discloses the fact that beneath it is the resting-place of 
the good Dr. Worcester, first Secretary of the Board, aiid an enthusiastic laborer 
among the Cherokees. A hundred rods away stands one of the old mission- 
houses, now a decaying ruin, inhabited by a horde of negroes. Cherokee and 
missionary have gone their ways together ; there is not one to be encountered in 



528 MISSIONS AMONG THE INDIANS. 

any nook of the forest ; the current of Fate has swept the Indian to the West, 
and the priests who labored for him into almost forgotten graves. 

At the beginning of the present century the Indian still held the territory of 
North-western Georgia secure against the intrusion of the white man's laws, and 
also roamed over extensive tracts in Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. 
In the deep coves between the parallel ranges of the Cumberland, along the vast 
palisades by the winding Tennessee, and through the furrowed and ridgy lands 
extending toward Virginia and Kentucky, he wandered unrestrained. But the 
pale-iace was on his track, anxious first to gain his good-will, and then to reason 
him into a cession of his beautiful lands. It was with the bitterness of despair in 
his heart that one of the chieftains said he had " learned to fear the white man's 
friendship more than his anger." 

But the Cherokees did not seem to dread or detest the missionaries of the 
American Board. They knew them for men without guile or desire for personal 
gain, and they learned to love them. When good Cyrus Kingsbury founded the 
mission of Brainard, in 1 8 1 7, on the banks of that Chickamauga whose waters, a 
few years since, ran red with the blood of civil war, it was with the cordial 
consent of all the principal chiefs. Schools and churches were founded ; log mis- 
sion-houses erected ; even the President of the United States allowed the use of 
the public funds for the building of a school-house for girls. Kingsbury, Corne- 
lius, Evarts and Worcester became eloquent champions of the Indians when their 
rights were assailed, and each missionary successively risked his liberty and life 
for the much wronged aborigines. At last a crisis arrived. The State of 
Georgia began to extend her criminal jurisdiction over the lands claimed by the 
Cherokees, and with scorn disregarded all efforts of the Indians to protect them- 
selves by an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. Angered 
because the missionaries sided with the Cherokees in the exciting question, the 
officers of the Georgia Government imprisoned the noble Worcester and one of 
his fellow-laborers in the penitentiary, for " illegal residence among the Indians," 
and "because they gave advice on political matters." This last charge the mis- 
sionaries solemnly denied, but refused of their own will to quit their posts, and 
the pardon which had been offered them was withdrawn. While they spent 
weary months in prison, the Cherokees were occupied with internal dissension, 
and with ineffectual resistance to the encroaching Georgians. At last the treaties 
which virtually banished the Indians from their homes were signed, and in 1838 
the troops gathered up into one long and sorrowful procession thousands of men, 
women and children, and hurried them from the State. Depleted and worn 
down by every imaginable privation, more than 4,000 of the unfortunates died 
on their long march of 600 miles to their new homes west of the Mississippi, — 
forming a ghastly sacrifice to commemorate the white man's greed. 

Leaving the brier-invaded grave-yard and the tumbling mission-houses, and 
climbing to the summit of Mission Ridge, a vision of perfect beauty is before one. 
To the east is Chickamauga valley, following the course of the historic creek, and 
dotted with pleasant farms and noble groves ; westward one looks down upon a 
rich and broad interval, bounded by high bluffs with rocky faces, along whose 



CHATTANOOGA VALLEY. 



529 



bases the noble stream of the Tennessee flows with many an eccentric turn, until, 
as if amazed and startled at the grandeur of Lookout mountain, which rises just 
within the vale to 2,400 feet above the sea-level, it turns inland once more in a 
western course, becoming rapid and turbulent as it descends through gorges and 
forests, to Northern Alabama. "Lookout" is an outlier of the Cumberland 
table-land, and extends across the Tennessee line into Georgia. One may travel 
for more than forty miles along its breezy height without finding anywhere a 
really advantageous point at which to descend. Between Mission Ridge and 
Lookout mountain lies Chattanooga valley, the " Crow's Nest," as the Indians 
called it, and as its name signifies. It is, indeed, not unlike a nest or cup securely 
set down among huge mountain barriers, through which one can discern no pass, 



i-M 






*^7wm 




Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

and which only the birds can afford to despise. Everywhere ridges, sharply- 
projecting spurs from the Cumberland, caves, forests, rocks, bluffs ! How can 
traffic find its way through such a country ? 

Far below, as you stand on Mission Ridge, with " Lookout's" shadow thrown 
across the brilliant sunlight, falling on the slopes up which Grant sent his men on 
that day of blood in 1863, you may see the city of Chattanooga, "the gateway 
of the South." On the present site of the town, the south bank of the Tennessee 
river, there stood, in 1835, a Cherokee trading post. In 1837 a good many 
white families from Virginia and the Carolinas had moved there, and a post-office 
called Ross's Landing was established. The original lots into which the town 
was partitioned were disposed of by lottery, after the expulsion of the Indians, 



530 THE GROWTH OF CHATTANOOGA. 

and the vast commerce that to-day uses the Tennessee's current as the chief 
transporting medium soon created quite a trading post. From upper Eastern 
Tennessee came iron and ironware, corn, wheat and whiskey, and Virginia sent 
down great quantities of salt. In 1838 a new town was started and christened 
Chattanooga.* Ten years later, railroad communication, via Atlanta, with Char- 
leston and Savannah, gave the little town 40,000 bales of cotton as its annual 
shipment ; and when Robert Cravens began to manufacture charcoal iron there, 
at a cost of $10 to $14 per ton, shipping it to New Orleans, St. Louis and Cin- 
cinnati, for from $30 to $40 per ton, the settlers multiplied very rapidly. The 
cotton trade was lost to Chattanooga by the building of the Memphis and 
Charleston railroad, which did away with the painful navigation of the Tennes- 
see up from Alabama, and the portage around "Muscle Shoals;" but the grain 
and stock trade steadily increased, and in 1861 the town boasted 3,500 popula- 
tion. Then the war came to it. 

Planted at the very mouth of the narrow passes, through which trade and 
travel pick their difficult way, Chattanooga has sprung, since the war's close, 
from a village into a prosperous city of 12,000 inhabitants. Its aspect to-day is 
that of a North-western settlement, Northern and Western men having flocked 
to it in large numbers. The men who campaigned among the mountains around 
it, and who fought so desperately to get to it, year after year, noted its wonder- 
ful advantages as a railway centre in one of the richest mineral regions in the 
world, and when they were mustered out settled there. The march of progress 
began. It was a revelation to the people of the surrounding country — that 
steady and rapid improvement at Chattanooga. They had always known that 
there were coal, iron and oil in the vicinity in such quantities that, in the words 
of a public speaker who once upbraided them for their lack of enterprise, "within 
sight of the city might be found Pittsburg ploughs that had been worn out upon 
the iron ore lying loosely on the hill-sides; " yet they had not dreamed that with 
cheap iron and cheap coal at their doors they had the elements of empire in their 
hands. To-day Chattanooga is connected with the outer world by five trunk 
lines of rail, and the surveys for the sixth, and in some respects the most remark- 
able, have been completed. The Western and Atlantic connects the city with 
Atlanta and the South ; the Nashville and Chattanooga line pierces the Cumber- 
land, and gives a route to Louisville and the Ohio; the East Tennessee, Virginia, 
and Georgia road reaches to Bristol, giving direct connection with Lynchburg, 
Washington and New York ; the Alabama and Chattanooga runs through mar- 
velous coal and iron fields to Meridian, in Mississippi, whence there is a direct 
line to the " Father of Waters," and the Memphis and Charleston opens up a 
vast fertile section in Northern Alabama and a corner of Mississippi, a section 
unhappily strewn at present with wrecks of once prosperous plantations. The 
track of the war is visible through all the beautiful Tennessee valley, and for 
miles one sees nothing but ruins and neglected lands. The " Cincinnati South- 
ern " railroad is intended to run from the Ohio metropolis to Chattanooga, and 

* This was done at the suggestion of Mr. John P. Long, one of the prominent citizens of 
Chattanooga, who is very familiar with the Indian language and legends. 



THE TENNESSEE RIVER TRAFFIC. 



531 



will operate as an outlet from the Ohio valley to the south-eastern seaboard, 
while it will also furnish a desirable connection with the Gulf system of roads. 
It will penetrate some of the richest regions of Kentucky, will cross the Cumber- 
land river at Point Burnside, and run through the Sequatchie valley, along an 
almost unbroken coal-field. 

With so many important and really finely - built lines of travel stretching from 
it in all directions, one would naturally suspect Chattanooga of an inclination to 




The Mineral Region in the vicinity of Chattanooga. 

disregard her river traffic, yet she is by no means unmindful of it. Operating as 
the distributing point for the whole river- valley, and indeed for the far South, the 
city crowds her storehouses yearly with corn, wheat, and bacon, brought hun- 
dreds of miles in flat-boats and small steamers along the winding river from 
Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina. At high water season the stream is 
crowded with rustic crafts of all kinds, and the jolly raftsmen who have been 
for months in the forests, and have drifted down stream on broad platforms 
of pine logs, make merry in highways and by-ways. Transportation of coal. 




ILLITERACY 

Compiled from 9th.Census 



Russell & Struthers,N.^ 



MAP SHOWING GRADES OF ILLITERACY IN THE UNITED STATES. 



53 2 THE EAST TENNESSEE MINERAL REGION. 

and iron by river would not cost more than one-fourth the sum demanded 
by the railways. 

The surroundings of Chattanooga are of the wildest and most romantic 
beauty, and in gazing down from " Lookout," or from the humbler Mission 
Ridge, upon the lovely valley, with its majestic river and lordly ledges, one can- 
not repress a fear that some day all these natural beauties will be hidden by the 
smoke from the five hundred chimneys which will be erected in honor of the god 
Iron. For it is to be a town of rolling-mills and furnaces, giant in its traffic, like 
Pittsburg and St. Louis, and inhabited by thousands of hard-handed, brawny- 
armed artisans. There is hardly a county in Eastern Tennessee where the 
resources destined to make Chattanooga one of the commercial centres of the 
country do not abound. Along the Great Unaka chain, in those counties border- 
ing upon the Smoky, over which we passed on our way to the North Carolina 
mountains, lie some of the richest sections, of the "eastern iron belt" — which 
extends northward into Virginia and southward into Georgia. In the "Valley," 
that rich and populous quarter of Tennessee, on whose ridges and in whose 
nooks are raised some of the noblest physical specimens of the American man, the 
mineral development seems incredible. In what is known as the "Dyestone 
Belt" the immense layers of red hematite run without a break for 150 miles, 
swelling sometimes to eight or ten feet in thickness, but never sinking below five. 
One hundred pounds of this stratified red-iron rock, soft and easily crushed, will 
yield seventy pounds of pure iron. It is the same ore which, outcropping in 
Virginia, has for years supplied the splendid furnaces of Eastern Pennsylvania, 
and extending through North-eastern Georgia into Alabama, is known as the 
"Red Mountain " ore of the latter State. And this grand belt lies at the very 
base of the coal-measures ! 

The East Tennessee valley extends north-east and south-west about 280 
miles from Chattanooga to the Virginia line. North-west of it is the Cumberland 
table-land, which Andrew Jackson was wont to declare would one day be the 
garden of the United States; and one of the outlines of this plateau, extending 
from the vicinity of Chattanooga to Cumberland Gap, is known as " Walden's 
Ridge." This is the south-eastern limit of the great Appalachian coal-field, which 
covers 6,000 square miles — considerably more than the entire coal area of Great 
Britain. All the ridges in the "Valley " contain minerals; they are ribbed with 
iron ore of every variety. In some cases the veins of red fossiliferous ore extend 
under the coal-fields. 

The numerous rivers heading in the North Carolina and Western Virginia 
mountains drain north-west toward the Tennessee, and form natural highways 
upon which to bear the ore to the beds of coal. The stores of red and 
brown hematites in the Alleghany chain and the Cumberland range are abso- 
lutely inexhaustible. This grand mineral-field is blessed with a delicious 
climate, which the high mountain walls render temperate in winter and cool and 
entirely free from malaria in summer. 

Before i860 numbers of furnaces were worked in the " Dyestone Belt," and 
excellent ore was produced ; but an especial impetus has been given to the 



THE ROCKWOOD I RON - FU RN ACE. 



533 



production of that section since the war. General John T. Wilder, of Ohio, 
while campaigning under Rosecrans against Chattanooga, in 1863, at the 
head of a brigade of mounted infantry, became interested in the hills, from 
which might be blasted thousands of tons of ore in a day, in the great veins 
of hematites, sometimes covering hundreds of acres, and in that mighty stretch 
of 200 miles along the now famous ridge, where coal and iron lie only half 
a mile apart, with massive limestone between them. When he laid by his 
sword, he continued the study of these mineral deposits, and after purchasing 
the site on which the village and furnaces of Rockwood now stand, associated 
with himself a company of capitalists, and in 1867 organized the Roane Iron 




The Rockwood Iron - Furnaces — Eastern Tennessee. 

Company, with a capital of $1,000,000. This company purchased the rail- 
mill at Chattanooga, which had been built by the Federal Government; tun- 
neled the Cumberland mountain for coal; and in 1868 began to manufacture 
pig-iron cheaper than it has been made elsewhere in the country, and to 
supply it to the rolling-mills, sending it down the Tennessee river in steamers 
and barges.* Rockwood is now a brisk village of 2,000 inhabitants, of whom 
about one-half are workmen in the furnaces and the coal mines. It is situ- 

* According to the census of 1870, there were then in Tennessee fourteen establishments 
manufacturing pig-iron, with twenty-three blast-furnaces and $1,103,750 capital, producing 
28,688 tons, worth $1,147,707. There were eighteen rolling-mills with a capital of $253,75°* 
producing rolled iron worth $369,222, and thirty-three manufactories of cast-iron, with a capital" 
of $331,392, the products of which annually amounted to about $500,000. The number of 
establishments has much increased since that time. 



534 



MATERIA], PROGRESS. 



ated seventy miles north-east of Chattanooga, in the heart of a rugged 
mountain region.* 

The energetic Western men who have it in charge are confident that in 
a few years the city of Chattanooga will rival Pittsburg in growth, for they 




The "John Ross House," near Chattanooga. Residence of one of the old Cherokee Landholders. 

claim that they can manufacture iron at least ten or twelve dollars per ton 
cheaper than it can be made anywhere ■ else in the United States. It would 
certainly be remarkable if a mineral region so vast and well stocked as that 
of Northern Georgia, Northern Alabama, and Eastern Tennessee, — in the 
midst of which Chattanooga stands, — should not produce at least one city of 
a hundred thousand inhabitants within a few years. The new aspirant for 
the honors of rapid growth has made sterling progress. Cotton-mills and car 
works are springing up beside the rolling-mills and foundries ; many fine 
mansions already grace the principal residence streets, and hundreds of 
mechanics are building neat cottages along the slopes on both sides of the 
Tennessee. Swiss capital is engaged in the manufacture of cotton, and 
English investors are carefully studying the iron and coal fields with a view 

* Twenty-five thousand tons of ore are mined at Rockwood yearly, and about 12,000 tons of 
pig-iron are sent thence to Chattanooga, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Louisville. The rolling-mill at 
Chattanooga produces about 15,000 tons of rails annually. The impetus given to the growth of 
Chattanooga by the establishment of this mill and the Vulcan Iron Works has been tremendous. 
The price paid the Government for the rolling-mill and 145 acres of land at Chattanooga by 
the Roane Iron Company, was $225,000. The patent puddling apparatus of an Englishman 
named Danks — an apparatus which is expected to revolutionize iron manufacture by an 
immense saving in cost — has been introduced into the works. The cost of ore at the Rock- 
wood furnaces is about $2 per ton; that of coal, $1.40 per ton; limestone, eighty cents. It is 
not astonishing, in view of these prices, that the company hope eventually to manufacture rails 
and deliver them in Pittsburg cheaper than they can be made there. 



ACTIVITY IN CHATTANOOGA. 



535 



to finally erecting large rolling-mills in the city; banks, good hotels, well-planned 
streets, and excellent schools and churches have arisen like magic within seven 
years ; and the constant stream of produce transferred from the river to the rail- 
roads gives an activity and feverishness to the aspect of the streets, at certain 
seasons, which is quite inspiring. Even within the town limits iron ore is to be 
found. It lies in the north-west slopes of "Cameron Hill," a high bluff from which 
one can overlook the Tennessee and the busy town stretched along its banks, 
even to the base of " Lookout." In the Eastern, Dyestone, and Western iron 
belts of Tennessee there were more small furnaces before the war than at present; 
but it is doubtful if so much iron was manufactured then as now. Capital is fast 
finding out the best locations for furnaces and rolling-mills in each of the three 
States whose commercial centre Chattanooga properly is, and hundreds of thou- 
sands of acres have recently been purchased by companies, who will probably 
develop them within the next five years. 




Catching a "Tarpin.' 



LX. 



LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN THE BATTLES AROUND CHATTANOOGA. 

KNOXVILLE EASTERN TENNESSEE. 



MOST persons in this country or in Europe who have heard of Lookout 
mountain since " the war " have also been told of the " battle above 
the clouds." It was my fortune to scale the remarkable palisade at a time when 
the broad plateau which runs along its summit was literally enshrouded in 
formidable mists. The rain was falling in torrents as, with two companions, I 
galloped through the little town at the foot of the mountain ; but ere we had 
scaled the winding road, the shower was over, and a brisk wind began to stir the 




■■■■.•■.■- 







t Mountain, near Chattanooga. 



mists. We could see little but the ledges along whose sides the route ran, but as 
we arrived nearly at the summit, the mist-curtain was lifted for an instant, and 
revealed to us a delicious expanse of valley, with sunlight's smiles here and there 
chasing away the rain's tears. Then we were shrouded in again; and our horses, 
apparently inspired by the gloomy grandeur of the occasion, rattled furiously 
along the hard roads, over which the boughs hung uncomfortably near our heads. 
The red sandy clay nourishes enormous pines, whose roots have here and there 
been disturbed by the sandstone bowlders, and stretched out their fibres in a des- 
perate grasp; beside the pathways great blocks of stone, carved by the storms and 
polished by the winds, are scattered. We galloped nearly to the massive perpen- 
dicular wall which arises directly out of the valley, and disdainfully frowns down 



THE VIEW FROM LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 



5; 



upon the Tennessee, spurned from its base fourteen hundred feet below ; and 

tethering our horses, approached to the very edge. There we seemed shut 

off from all the world. Now and then a hum from the valley — the growl 

of a locomotive or the rolling of wheels — came faintly up ; we heard the 

cow-bells and the bleating of the 

sheep on the hill-sides behind us ; and 

just as we were trying to imagine 

how " the battle " must have been, 

the wind came sweeping away the 

mist-curtain, and — we beheld the 

whole ! 

From " Umbrella Rock " we saw 
" the Moccasin," that curious point of 
land made by the Tennessee's abrupt 
turn. The streets and houses of Chat- 
tanooga seemed like toys, or little 
blocks of wood. Mission Ridge was 
an insignificant blue line. The Ten- 
nessee seems to turn in deference to 
Chattanooga, for it might readily in- 
undate it, and has once compelled 
the citizens to navigate their streets 
in boats. Beyond it, northward and 
westward, the eye encounters forests 
and ridges where the mountains seem to have been split asunder by some 
convulsion of nature — until at last, on the east, the Cumberland range springs 
up, and forbids you to choose any other horizon. Southward, beyond broad 
and quiet vales, richly cultured, are the mountains of Georgia, and westward 
the tree- crested ridges in Alabama. 

We clambered down a flight of wooden steps to a secure point of the crags, 
and looked over the valley out of which Hooker hurried his troops on to the 
summit when he broke the left of Bragg's formidable army. It was a wild 
struggle, a running and leaping fight among rocks and behind trees, when men 
carried their lives in their hands, and their swords in their teeth, as they wormed 
their way through the fastnesses, and then made their charge upon the foe so 
strongly intrenched above the very clouds, upon "Point Lookout." 

The old Government hospital still stands on its picturesque bluff, deserted 
now save by curious visitors; here and there along the broad plateau are scattered 
comfortable houses, and log-cabins ; good roads lead into the northern counties 
of Georgia. Near "Rock City," — a gigantic series of galleries in disrupted stone 
pinnacles which rise amid the ragged brush and saplings, — is another enormous 
uplift of limestone, from which one may see the whole of Chattanooga valley, 
the Raccoon and Lookout ranges, and the battle-field of Chickamauga. De- 
scending five or six miles from the point where the turnpike from the city 
reaches the summit, into the valley of Walker county, in Northern Georgia, 




Umbrella Rock, on Lookout Mountain. 



538 



LAKE SECLUSION BATTLES AROUND CHATTANOOGA. 



one comes to a region of precipices and waterfalls, of tarns and caves, of 
landslides and bluffs. 

Near " Lake Seclusion," an apparently bottomless well, sunk a hundred feet 
below the surrounding rocks, the scenery is exquisite. In autumn the foliage on 
the cliffs bordering the stream which flows through this lake, and plunges farther 
on down a ravine in a blinding spray-cloud, which the Indians named " Lulah 
Falls," is so rich in color that the whole country seems aflame. From one or 
two of the highest points the ragged ends of the Lookout plateau, and the 
pleasant expanse of valley beyond, may be seen. 

Riding day by day along the broad tables of the Cumberland, in the nooks 
oh the banks of the Tennessee, and up and over the ridges near the scene of 
Chickamauga, it was pleasant to hear anew the story of the great fight around 
Chattanooga from the lips of those who had been participants. But it was all 
unreal, dreamlike. When we stood with our feet in half-filled rifle-pits, or 

among the shattered and 
cannon- scorched tree- 
trunks on the field of 
combat, it was still remote, 
indefinite. I fancy even 
the natives of the country 
round about only remem- 
ber the whole struggle 
vaguely now and then ; 
although a Chattanooga 
man once said to a new- 
comer from the West that 
when he wanted some 
paper which the invading 
army had burned up for 
him, or remembered the 
losses of property he had suffered, he " hated the whole Yankee nation for a 
minute or two ; " but he added, " it 's only for a minute or two, and those 
minutes don't come as often as they did." 

Chattanooga's possession by the Union army cost many thousands of lives ; 
but it opened the way to Atlanta and the sea. The line which stretched from 
Lookout's northern crag to Mission Ridge, on the night of November 24th, 1863, 
might have been quadrupled in strength if the dead warriors from Murfreesboro 
and Chickamauga could have been marshaled into it. There was an especial 
bitterness in the struggle for this rocky gateway. After the staggering blows 
which both armies had received in the terrible fight by Stone river, Bragg and 
Rosecrans were both willing enough to rest for a little ; but when Bragg had 
withdrawn, and it was evident that his formidable campaign, which had carried 
terror even to the gates of Louisville and Cincinnati, was at an end, the Union 
standards led the way to Chattanooga. There, strongly intrenched, Bragg 
defied his old antagonist. On the morning of August 21st, 1863, General 




Looking from "Lookout Cave.' 



A WAR REMINISCENCE. 



539 



Wilder, commanding the advance of Rosecrans' army, began shelling the city 
which he now makes his home, from the hills at the north side of the river. 

Meantime day by day the Federal forces were investing Chattanooga, having 
crossed the Tennessee at Bridgeport, at Battle Creek, and at Shell Mound. On 
the 4th of September Burnside occupied Knoxville. Bragg moved the Con- 
federate forces away toward Dalton, and Rosecrans entered the town, and 
followed the enemy, who turned fiercely, and stood at bay on Chickamauga. 
Longstreet's Virginians and Bragg's hardy army fought with the energy of des- 
peration; and if, on that memorable 19th of September, when the combatants 
waded in blood, Longstreet had had another than Thomas to encounter, he might 
have carried the Federal left which he so furiously attacked. Thomas drove 
Longstreet back a mile or two, but, as the centre failed to keep pace with his 
advance, he was compelled to halt. 

Then Bragg fell upon the forces under command of McCook and Crittenden, 
and the waves of battle flowed to and fro. until night, when the Federal army 
still held its own ground. Early in the morning Thomas had the enemy once 
more hurled at him, but repulsed him as before. The Union right and centre 
were driven back ; McCook was confused and demoralized ; Thomas alone stood 
like a rock, and kept the enemy at arm's length until night, when he fell back to 
Rossville, to be attacked again, and to once more repulse his foes the next day. 
Fifteen thousand men had been lost to the Union army, in killed, wounded and 
missing, in these two days ; 
and the Confederates had lost 
18,000. The field of Chicka- 
mauga was piled with the dead, 
and the rivulets literally ran 
blood. 

The flushed and defiant 
enemy now stood ready to 
again fall upon Chattanooga. 
They had struck some terrible 
blows. Rosecrans, McCook, 
and Crittenden, were removed 
from command. The Confed- 
erate forces occupied Lookout 
mountain and controlled the 
valley, cutting off rail and river 
communication. Provisions 
were hauled over the rough 
hill-roads and through the nar- 
row passes On the north side "Rock City," Lookout Mountain. [Page 537.] 

of the river, for seventy miles, by animals worn to skeletons, and by men who 
were half starved; and so, on mountain and in forest, along the valleys and the 
rivers, the vigilant combatants stood, patiently awaiting the next move, when 
there came upon the scene a man named Grant. 
35 




54-0 



THE OPENING OF THE GATEWAY. 



As soon as General Grant had taken command of the military division of the 
Mississippi, communication, both by river and rail, was gradually re-established,, 
and Chattanooga was unlocked. Sherman reinforced the army there in mid- 
November. Grant's next move was to allow Longstreet to do what he had 
several times unsuccessfully tried, pass the Federal army to the east of Chatta- 
nooga and march against Burnside and the army of the Ohio. Longstreet had 
20,000 splendid soldiers, and Burnside far less ; it might fare hardly with the 
latter, but it was one of the moves on Grant's chessboard, and there was nothing 
to be said. It resulted in checkmating Bragg at Mission Ridge. 

Twenty thousand men having been taken from the line which the Con- 
federates had stretched along the Lookout plateau, — eastwardly across Chatta- 
nooga valley to Mission Ridge, at or near Rossville Gap, and thence northwardly 



j^ttl,™. 





View from Wood's Redoubt, Chattanooga. 

on the Ridge toward Chickamauga creek,— by the departure of Longstreet, that 
line was attacked. The plan was to assault the wings, to cause Bragg to throw 
large forces to their protection, and then to break the centre. 

Hooker and Sherman began working in earnest. The 24th of November saw 
the left of the enemy driven from Lookout, and the right forced out of its 
position. Next day the wave of war swept up Mission Ridge, over the 
charming slopes where now the great National cemetery is situated, up to the 
summit; and at sunset General Grant moved his head-quarters from Wood's 
Redoubt to the Ridge, which in the morning had been guarded by sentinels in 
gray. The enemy was next day driven from his base of supplies. 

The siege was over. The pathway to the sea lay before Sherman. 

Wood's Redoubt is still one of the most striking objects in the valley of Chat- 
tanooga. Standing on the grass-grown ramparts one has an exquisite view of 
Lookout, the Tennessee's abrupt recoil at its base, and the sharp peak of Eagle 
Point, and can note the two turns of the river, with the Moccasin Point between, 
around whose southern bend, on a November midnight in 1863, Sherman 
moved 3,000 soldiers in pontoons. Northward, and opposite the redoubts, over- 
hanging the Tennessee, is Cameron Hill, from whose wind-swept height one can 
look down upon Chattanooga's busy streets as from a balloon. On the slopes 
adjacent to Cameron Hill there are many handsome residences, and Wood's 



THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH. 54I 

Redoubt itself will in a few years be lost sight of under the foundations of some 
charming villa. On many of the hills a faint outline of the old fortifications may 
be traced ; but they will soon have vanished forever. 

It would be difficult to imagine more romantic approaches than those through 
which the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad finds its way to the latter city. 
For seventy-five or eighty miles it runs through a bold, mountainous country ; 
but about twenty-five miles before reaching Chattanooga it bends downward into 
the mighty passes among the Cumberlands in Northern Alabama, and crawling 
under rocks and on the brinks of chasms, now running on the edges of valleys 
clothed in perfect forests, and now shooting into long tunnels, works its way 
to the valley. As one approaches Lookout by this route, the effect is extremely 
imposing ; a new and striking view is presented at each instant ; the cliffs seem 
to present no outlet ; the train is apparently about to be cast down some yawn- 
ing ravine, when one sees the continuation of the route. 

Sixty-two miles from Chattanooga, on a spur of the Cumberland, at Sewanee,. 
in Tennessee, is situated the " University of the South." This remarkable insti- 
tution owes its origin to the late Bishop Leonidas Polk, of Louisiana. He desired 
to concentrate the interests of the several Southern dioceses of the Episcopal 
Church upon one school where religious education might be given in a thorough 
manner; and in 1836 he issued an address to the bishops of the various 
States of the South, proposing to establish a Christian University. The result 
was a large assembly of bishops and lay delegates at a meeting on Lookout 
Mountain's summit, in 1837, at which the general principles of union were 
discussed ; and the city of Sewanee was chosen some time thereafter. The 
Tennessee Legislature granted a liberal charter, and a domain of ten thousand 
acres of land had been secured, five hundred thousand dollars obtained toward 
an endowment, and the corner-stone of the central building laid, when the war 
began. In 1866 very little remained save' the domain; but in 1868, after some 
aid from England, the University was definitely established, and the more im- 
portant of the schools are now well organized, with able professors at their head. 
The institution is* under the perpetual control of a board of trustees composed of 
the bishops of the various Southern States, the senior bishop being, ex officio, 
Chancellor of the University. 

The location is charming. The University was started in the midst of an 
almost unbroken forest, but has now grouped around it a pleasant and refined 
community. It is about nine miles from the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad, 
and the great tunnel on that road passes under its lands. From Cowan, on the 
line, to Sewanee, the local coal mining company has built a good railroad. The 
Sewanee plateau is 2000 feet above the sea-level, in a richly-varied country,, 
abounding in cascades, ravines, groves, and uplands. 

There is an abundance of building material in the quarries of gray, blue, 
dove-colored and brown limestone, which lie beside the Sewanee Company's 
railroad, and as soon as the present insufficient endowment is enlarged, the erec- 
tion of permanent buildings will be begun. There are chalybeate springs in the 
vicinity, and the slopes of the Cumberland here are admirably adapted for grape 



542 



PEEP INTO A NEGRO'S CABIN. 



culture. Nearly 300 students are gathered into the various schools. Bishop 
Quintard, of Tennessee, has done the University great service in collecting 
money in England for its establishment, and he and others are now anxiously 
trying to secure $500,000 as an enlargement fund. 

Riding through the wooded country on the Tennessee's banks, not far from 
Chattanooga, one autumn day, we dismounted, a large and hungry party, before 
the door of a log-cabin, built on a hill-side, and hailed the inmates. A fat negro 
woman appeared at the corner of the rude veranda, and four plump negro babies 
regarded us through the crevices between the logs with round-eyed fear. 
" Reckoned she could n't give us no dinner — no way;" finally was very positive, 
and said "she had nothing in the house." But persistence was rewarded by 




On the Tennessee River, near Chattanooga. 

permission to return in an hour, and she would see what could be improvised. 
At the hour's end we found in the cabin a rough table spread with bacon, and 
corn-bread just baked in the ashes; a few sweet potatoes were presently proffered, 
and some tea was made. By the fireside, rocking a black cherub, was another 
woman, younger and more comely than our host. These two cultivated a little 
field; their "husbands," or the men of the house,— for marriage is not always 
considered necessary among the negroes, — were away at work in another 
county; and the children rolled in the dirt, and had no thoughts of school. It 
was the very rudest and most incult life imaginable; the cabin was cleanly, 
but primitive in all its furnishings ; the round of these people's lives seemed 
to be sleeping and waking, with a struggle between morning and evening to 



IMPROVEMENT OF THE TENNESSEE. 



543 



get enough to put into their mouths ; they had no thought of thrift or prog- 
ress. Now and then they went to a religious gathering, and, perhaps, had 
"experiences," and were converted; then they gradually relapsed into their 
dull condition. 

The mountain roads in all the section bordering on the Tennessee are 
beautiful. There are many bold bluffs, one and two hundred feet high, which 




The " Suck," on the Tennessee River. 

overlook the stream ; and one comes upon stretches of fertile fields. The 
inhabitants, white or black, are invariably civil and courteous. The farmers, 
clad in homespun, mounted on raw-boned horses, are willing and eager to 
compare notes with strangers. They have caught a touch of the inspiration 
Chattanooga diffuses around itself, and carefully explore their lands in the 
hope of finding minerals. 

The Tennessee is receiving some improvement here and there. At the point 
called the "Suck," where the waters rush through a gorge in the mountains, over 
a rocky bed and in a shallow channel, we saw dredge-boats at work. The river 
has ordinarily more water than the Ohio, and a permanent bed, with little 
or no sand or gravel, so that there is no danger of the formation of those bars 
which obstruct the navigation of so many Western rivers. 

The attention of the Government has been directed toward the needed 
improvements ever since 1828, and the ruins of the Muscle Shoals canal, which 
originally cost $700,000, testify to the thoroughness of the plans then made. If 
that canal were put in condition again, and the obstructions between Muscle 
Shoals and Knoxville were removed, America would be the richer by one grand 
water highway. 

Knoxville, once the capital of Tennessee, and one of the most illustrious 
and venerable of its communities, is situated on the Holston river about 100 
miles above Chattanooga. It is to-day as actively engaged in developing the 
mighty resources of Eastern Tennessee as is its sister of the valley, and a 
generous rivalry exists between the two towns, represented in the newspapers 
by good-humored raillery, in which the editors of both cities seem admirable 
proficients. Five miles east of Knoxville the lovely French Broad river empties 
its dancing and frothing current, released from the passes of the North Carolina 
mountains, into the Tennessee. Knoxville was named for that worthy Knox 



544 



KNOXVILLE AND ITS HISTORY. 



who was Secretary of War under the presidency of Washington. The town 
dates from 1794, when Colonel White, proprietor of the lands, laid it out into 
lots. Three years before, on the 5 th of December, 1791, in the midst of 
Indian massacres and battles, the first Tennessee newspaper was issued by 
George Roulstone. Although it was printed at Rogers ville, it was called The 
Knoxville Gazette, and was identified with the interests of the then territorial 
seat of government. 

The section of which Knoxville thus became the chief town has a most roman- 
tic history. In 1760 there was not a single civilized inhabitant in Tennessee. A 
few daring woodsmen pushed into the wilderness a few years later, and founded 
settlements on the Watauga and the Holston, to which nocked settlers from North 




A Negro Cabin on the bank of the Tennessee. [Page 542.] 

Carolina and Virginia. North Carolina, in those days a province, was disquieted 
by taxation which she considered illegal; and thousands who had been com- 
pelled to fly from their homes, because they had actively resisted the oppression 
of Governor Tryon, took refuge with the adventurers at Watauga. In a few 
years the surrounding country re-echoed to the blows of the woodsmen's axes, 
and the Indians began to regard their encroachments with alarm and resentment. 
But shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and the downfall of royal 
government in North Carolina, the members of the Watauga Association had a 
peaceable meeting with the Cherokees and their chiefs, and purchased from them, 
for ^2,000, all the lands on which they had settled. The Elizabethton of 



THE STATE OF "FRANKLIN." 545 

to-day, a little mountain hamlet, occupies the site of the old Watauga. Shortly- 
after the purchase, the Cherokees began open hostilities, and the Tennessean had 
then, as for many a long year thereafter, to risk his life daily. Battles ensued ; 
the Indians organized expeditions to cut off and annihilate the infant colonies ; 
war raged through all the North Carolina mountains and along the Unaka range. 
The result was an invasion of the Cherokee towns by the militia of North Car- 
olina and the settlements. Eighteen hundred men, armed with rifles, tomahawks, 
and butcher knives, — thus saith the^ ancient chronicle, — marched across the 
Holston and the French Broad, and drove the Indians everywhere before them. 
A pious chaplain accompanied this little army of invasion, and was the first 
Christian minister that ever preached in Tennessee. Immigration flowed after 
the army, and the Indians were dismayed. The Watauga settlement, triumph- 
ant, petitioned for annexation to North Carolina, and its prayer was granted. 
The Legislature of that State, in 1777, founded Washington county, which occu- 
pied the whole district now included within the present boundaries of Tennessee. 
Two years later explorers had planted a field with corn on the spot where the 
present city of Nashville stands. 

The recital of the border wars, and of dashing expeditions down the Ten- 
nessee river, would require volumes. Men sprang up, rude, hardy, brave — the 
outgrowth of their time ; their brains were filled with visions of empire ; they 
fought by day and planned by night. After the independence of the United 
States had been acknowledged by Great Britain, each State endeavored to relieve 
the indebtedness of the country, by cessions to Congress, of their unappropriated 
lands ; and, accordingly, North Carolina ceded her new acquisition, now known 
as Tennessee. This made political orphans of our brave Watauga settlers and 
their followers, so they forthwith created an independent State called Franklin, 
which was ruled over by an energetic and daring man named Sevier, and 
maintained a stormy existence from 1784 to 1788, during much of which time 
it was considered by the Government of North Carolina as practically in revolt. 
Sevier was engaged in many a daring battle and mountain skirmish ; was once 
carried off by his friends at the moment a court in North Carolina was trying 
him for his offenses ; and was, after Franklin became United States territory, 
sent to Congress. His associates in the Government of Franklin, — Cocke, White, 
the founder of Knoxville, Ramsey, Doak, Center, Reese, Houston, Newell, 
Weir and Conway, — were, subsequently, leading spirits in the affairs of Ten- 
nessee. Greenville, the present home of ex-President Andrew Johnson, and 
a pretty village set down graciously among exquisite mountains, was founded in 
the days of Franklin, and was the original seat of government. In 1785 the 
third Franklin convention was held there, in a court-house built of unhewn 
logs, and there the State Constitution was finally adopted. 

White's Fort, the location of Knoxville, was, at the time of the fall of Frank- 
lin, a stockaded settlement, to which settlers were rapidly flocking. On the high 
plateau which, extending southward, terminated in a bold bluff on the Holston 
river, they saw excellent chances for defense ; and thus the site of the city was 
determined. In 1794, Governor Blount, controlling the territory for the United 



546 



KNOXVILLE OF TO-DAY. 



States, had his cabin at Knoxville, and was kept busy clay and night devising 
measures for the defense of the young settlement against the thoroughly 
maddened Cherokees. At one time, when the fighting force of Knoxville 
was forty men, more than fifteen hundred Indians marched against the 
town, but were turned aside by some trivial circumstance, and the colony 
was saved. 

As Knoxville had been the seat of the Territorial Government, so in 1 796 it 
became the State capital, and there the convention met, and the first Constitution 
was adopted. There, too, the "Washington College, in honor of the illustrious 




President of the United States," was incor- 
porated ; and there General Jackson, in 
the convention, suggested that the new State adopt the beautiful Indian 
name of Tennessee. Knoxville shared the honors of the government seat 
with Kingston, Murfreesboro, and Nashville alternately, but in 18 17 it became 
the capital for the last time. The centre of population moved beyond the 
Cumberland mountains, and the State officials went with it. To Knoxville were 
left the souvenirs of the bloody times in which it sprang into being, of councils 
with Cherokee chieftains, and struggles against their warriors, before the current 
of immigration came. 

Knoxville is to-day a flourishing town with nearly 15,000 population. It 
has more capital than Chattanooga, but not the same wonderful transporta- 
tion facilities. More actual business is, however, probably done there ; the 
town has a large wholesale trade, and is- a kind of supply depot for the 



THE PEOPLE OF EASTERN TENNESSEE. 547 

mountains. On the line of the road from New York to New Orleans, it has 
hopes of other communication shortly. The subject of narrow-gauge railroads 
has very much interested the people of Eastern Tennessee, and they will, in 
a few years, traverse the valleys in all directions. A direct line from Knox- 
ville to Macon in Georgia has been projected; and the completion of the 
Knoxville and Kentucky roads would be a great aid to the local commerce. 
The General Government is erecting a fine custom-house and post-office in the 
city. Thirty miles to the northward are large coal-fields, close to veins of iron ; 
in Carter and Greene counties there are iron mines which supply the rolling-mills 
and car- wheel establishments at Knoxville. There is an extensive manufacture 
of glass in that section ; the lumber interests are large, and considerable 
shipments are made to New England. Five miles east of Knoxville is a 
fine marble quarry, operated by capitalists from St. Louis. At Coal creek 
and Caryville, some thirty- five miles north of the town, there are extensive 
coal mining interests. The whole of Eastern Tennessee offers the best of 
inducements for the practical farmer, the wool- grower, and the investor in 
mines and minerals. 

The social condition of the people varies with the location. In previous chap- 
ters I have described the dwellers in the mountains bordering on North Carolina; 
those living in other remote counties are very similar in habits and intelligence. 
The political sentiment is yet, as it was during the war, difficult to classify. 
There were then hosts of uncompromising Union men in Eastern Tennessee ; but 
there were, also, many committed to the interests of the Confederacy, and both 
classes were much broken in fortune, and possibly discouraged, by the marching 
and counter-marching of the troops. Their farms were plundered by both 
armies ; and they often came near starvation themselves. In Knoxville the 
majorities are usually Republican, although the struggle is sometimes very close. 
In Chattanooga Republican municipal rule is also purchased at the expense of a 
careful fight. In the mountain counties people are not very much engrossed with 
general politics; their local affairs alone occupy their attention. At the period of 
my visit the school law allowed each county to decide for itself as to taxation for 
the support of free schools, and thus far no very marked progress has been made 
in the State. Tennessee admits the disagreeable fact that she ranks third in illit- 
eracy in the Union, but her population dees not seem as yet to feel the situation 
very keenly. Knoxville has good schools, with about 1,400 scholars as an aver- 
age attendance ; it also supports four colored schools. Chattanooga's regular 
attendance is about 1,000, and it also has two large colored schools. On the 
whole, Eastern Tennessee seems to make as much progress in education as other 
sections of the State in proportion to its population. Some of its counties have 
totally refused to have any public schools ; while others have levied small taxes 
for supporting winter sessions. The Peabody fund has been very active in East 
Tennessee, and it is largely due to its influential distribution that a feeling in 
favor of schools is gradually taking root among the masses. The founding of 
two or three Normal schools in the State is a prime necessity. In a common- 
wealth which has thus far succeeded in getting only one-fifth of its 400,000 pupil- 



548 



COLLEGES — AGRICULTURE. 



children into schools, the education of capable teachers is certainly of first 
importance. 

Knoxville is the seat of the East Tennessee University, and the State Asylum 
for deaf and dumb persons. The University has latterly received a large share 
of the $200,000 appropriated as the "Agricultural Fund " of the State, and will 
serve as the Agricultural College. It now has some 300 students. The Method- 
ist Episcopal Church contemplates founding a college at Knoxville ; and there, 
or at Chattanooga, the people of one of the grandest mineral regions on this 
continent should not fail to establish a school of mines. 

The peaks of the Cumberland, the Clinch and the Smoky, furnish Knoxville 
with many beautiful mountain views ; and the eye dwells with delight on the 



't/ s 







v-. : 



I ^^^SbsKKKmrnm^ 



The East Tennessee 
University — Knoxville. 



route from Chattanooga even to 
Greenville, upon the fields so 
beautifully cultivated, on the 
noble orchards, and the forests 
of mammoth corn stalks. The 
soil in this elevated valley is 
generally rich, second only to that of the Western prairies ; the summers are 
long, but never excessively hot; there is only a light snow-fall in winter; in 
the valleys the water is limestone ; on the hills freestone and chalybeate. On 
the table-lands grow rye, oats, and all vegetables; in the valleys wheat and corn 
attain extraordinary size. Apples, pears, peaches and wild grapes are cultivated 
in profusion, and the grazing-lands are no whit poorer than those of the North 
Carolina mountain region, which are so perfect and inexpensive. Land ranges 
in value from $5 to $35 per acre. 

Through this fruitful country, and almost on the line of the railroad of to-day, 
ran the " great Indian war-path " eighty years ago. When one reflects upon the 



THE DUCKTOWN COPPER REGION. 549 

vast territory cleared, settled, and dominated within three generations, by the 
Tennessean, he cannot refrain from admiration, nor will he refuse to believe in 
the greatest possibilities in the future. 

The Ducktown copper region in Eastern Tennessee, near the North Carolina 
line, is worth a visit from all interested in the State's development. It is the only 
locality in the commonwealth yielding copper ore in any considerable quantity. 
Although traces of the metal are to be met with in the Unaka mountains, they 
do not indicate veins of any importance. Ducktown is a mountain basin that 
belongs physically to Georgia and North Carolina. In the vicinity of the mines, 
2,000 feet above sea-level, deep ravines alternate with sharp ridges, at whose base 
the Ocoee river worms its way toward the main Unaka range — when it becomes 
a torrent, roaring over huge rocks in its passage through the narrows. As early 
as 1836, the attention of geologists was drawn to the mineral deposits near the 
junction of the Ocoee and the Hiawassee rivers, and indications of copper were 
finally discovered by men who were searching for gold. 

One of these men, while washing in the Hiawassee for gold, found great 
numbers of crystals of red copper ore. Soon after, the black oxide, which has 
thus far been the most important ore of the mines, was found ; but it was not 
until 1850 that mining was begun in earnest. The gentlemen who opened 
the mines found themselves surrounded by a rough population, who took no 
interest whatever in any improvements; and on one occasion, when they had 
called a meeting of the township, and explained to the assembled citizens that 
civilization and wealth would follow upon the opening of the mines, one of the 
assembly arose and said that most of those present had come to the mountains 
to get away from civilization, and if it followed them too closely, they would 
migrate again ! 

This was discouraging; but the owners of the mines opened day and Sabbath 
schools, and built roads over the hitherto almost impassable mountains; meantime 
sinking shafts and employing the few whom they could prevail upon to under- 
take regular labor. Between 1851 and the close of 1855 a number of mines 
were opened and worked successfully in this region, and during that time eight 
of them produced and shipped 14,291 tons, worth more than a million of dollars. 
A few years later a consolidated company, called "The Union," was formed 
from a number of the most prosperous organizations, and its works now extend 
over 2,500 acres. Refineries were constructed, and although the company was 
prevented from working much of the time during the war, it has been very pros- 
perous. The refining works have yielded nearly 1,500,000 pounds of refined 
copper since the war. In most of the Ducktown mines the operations have been 
confined to the zones of black and red copper ore, below which lie zones of iron 
and copper pyrites. The smelting works of the Union Consolidated Company 
are very extensive. 

Lead and zinc are pretty liberally scattered through Eastern Tennessee, and 
in Bradley and Monroe counties lead mines have been opened. At Mossy Creek, 
in Jefferson county, and in the mountains beyond, there are numerous irregular 
veins of zinc ore. The gold found in the eastern portion of the State has been 



55o 



COAL MINES THE SIEGE OF KNOXVILLE. 



a4#S 




At the JEina. Coal Mines. 



insignificant in quantity, although, in 1 83 1, there was a genuine gold fever con- 
cerning the discoveries along the Hiawassee. 

The most important coal mining establishments in the State are the ^Etna 
mines, in Marion county, and the Sewanee Company's mines, which extend 

several miles underground, not 
_ t ■ far from the location of the "Uni- 

versity of the South." Some of 
the veins at these latter mines are 
seven feet thick. 

The coal in these mountains 
can be mined for three cents per 
bushel, and the freights for coal 
on all the roads south of Nash- 
ville are low. All the Tennessee 
coals are bituminous ; but as such 
they present numerous varieties. 

One of the sources of future 
wealth for Eastern Tennessee con- 
sists in its immense stores of va- 
riegated marble, the veins of 
which run through ten or twelve 
counties in that section. Besides the finer marbles, there are, in the extreme 
eastern counties, black or dark-blue limestones, which, when polished, would 
make elegant marble slabs. There 1 is marble enough in this section to build 
all the public buildings of the United States for the next five centuries. 

The siege of Knoxville, in 1863, is called to memory, but faintly, by the 
earthworks scattered about the town, and now nearly obliterated ; but it was 
one of the most desperate struggles of the whole war. Longstreet and his men, 
fresh from their triumphs at Chickamauga, fell upon Burnside's little force in the 
mountain city with savage eagerness, but were hurled back into the jaws of 
death. They charged toward the ditches only to be pitched headlong over the 
wires strung to trip them, and to be massacred. But the living charged over 
the dead who filled the ditches, and twice had planted their flag or leaped upon 
the fortifications before they were finally swept away. Pools of blood six inches 
deep were found in the bottom" of the trenches when the assault was made on 
the morning after the repulse of November 29th, and hundreds of corpses were 
hastily buried in heaps. On the 5th of December following, the little army of 
the Ohio, which was literally at the point of starvation, was at liberty once 
more. The siege was raised. 

The magnitude of the mineral resources in this section perhaps affords the 
strongest argument in favor of the immediate removal of the obstructions in the 
Tennessee river ; but the arguments are really legion. This noble stream, sixth 
in magnitude in the United States, intersecting ten rich commonwealths — in 
connection with the Ohio, draining the gigantic coal-areas of Tennessee and 
Alabama — never bearing upon its current, from its sources to its mouth, winter 



SOIL OF THE TENNESSEE PLATEAU, 



551 



or summer, a particle of ice, and having half-a-dozen tributaries which could be 
rendered navigable by slack-water improvement, should be made one of the 
main commercial arteries of the South. With the necessary improvements, 
navigation could be rendered practicable for thirteen hundred miles above 
Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Only steamers of the lightest draught now succeed 
in running to Knoxville and beyond during six or nine months of each year. 

The soil of the great Tennessee plateau, the Cumberland table-land, is no less 
remarkable than the climate of that favored region. For the production of fruit, 
and for the raising of sheep and cattle, the immigrant will find it most admirably 
suited. Extending across the State from north to south, the plateau is at 
least forty miles wide from east to west, and can furnish homes for thousands of 
farmers, who need but little capital. 




1 Down in a Coal Mine 



LXI. 



A VISIT TO LYNCHBURG IN VIRGINIA. 



c <rr^IME to get up, boss!" 

X I hastily adjusted my garments, and hurried from the sleeping-car of 
the Richmond train on to the Gordonsville platform, where I was speedily 




The old Market at Lynchburg. [Page 554.] 



lost in a whirlpool of English and Scotch immigrants, surrounded by their 
numerous wives and children; of negro touters, shouting, "Dis way, boss, — 



THE NEGRO'S SENSE OF TITLES. 



553 



don' ye trust dat ar nigger, he don tole ye wrong 'bout de hotel, — take yer bag, 
sar ? " — of stout colored damsels, hastening to and fro with platters of cold and 
antiquated provisions, and blue-looking eggs ; of farmers coming from markets, 
and of through passengers shivering in the cool night air. 

" Now, boss, dar 's de Orange train ! " 

You must know that in the South the African is wont to designate strangers 
to whom he is indifferent by the euphonious title of "boss." It is, perhaps, a 
kind of compromise with his inclination to still cling to the old word " mas'r," 
and, at the same time, embodies as much respect as he cares to bestow on the 
" casual " whom he is called to serve. When familiar with your face, he will call 




The James River, at Lynchburg, Virginia. 

you "captain," if you are young; "major," if you are middle-aged, and 
"general" or "judge," if you are advanced in years. He has even been known 
to heap these titles upon strangers under the genial influence of the respect- 
provoking twenty-five cents. But at one o'clock in the morning, in hurrying 
you from one sleeping-car to another, it would take the potent influence of a 
brand-new dollar bill to wring from him any salutation save the accustomed 
"boss." 

The train from Washington came crawling along the Orange road, and 
received me, while the one I had just left rushed forward into the mountains, 
and by the side of the deep ravines of Western Virginia, toward the Ohio river. 



554 THE IMMIGRANTS — A PICTURESQUE TOWN. 

Among the immigrants there were many Englishmen of education and refine- 
ment, country gentlemen's sons who had made up their minds to try farming in 
the new country, or to purchase coal or iron tracts for speculation. Even the 
least cultured and rudest of these people wore the look of health and pros- 
perity. Their advent was an encouraging symptom. 

But in the car where the colored people were seated there were a good many 
discouraging signs. Was it possible to mould these slouching and ragged fellows, 
who talked so rudely, whose gestures were so uncouth, and on whose features 
had been stamped the seal of ignorance, into as useful and trustworthy citizens 
as these newly-arrived Britons, with their hardy cleanliness and bluff ambition, 
were likely to become ? And if not, what would be the future condition of the 
lately liberated slave ? Was he prospering, and hastening forward to the con- 
summation of the independent manhood promised him ? These questions, idly 
drifting in my sleepy mind without expecting answers, served to amuse and 
keep awake a tired body until the train trembled to a stand-still at the foot of 
the steep hill along whose sides Lynchburg lies. 

At midday I strolled out to survey the town. The September sun poured 
terrible heat upon the broad James river, which, opposite the network of tracks 
at the depot, flowed placidly at the base of an immense cliff, from whose stony 
sides quarrymen were blasting and chiseling blocks for building purposes. A 
few rafts and fiat-boats, steered by barearmed and bareheaded negroes, drifted 
lazily on the stream. A long covered bridge spanned the water, and a glance 
through its little windows showed quaint mills and houses upon the banks ; high 
bluffs, crowned with humble cabins, were rendered accessible by precipitous 
paths and flights of stone steps ; and, in the distance, were blue outlines of 
mountains, with little cloud-wreaths around them. 

Returning from the bridge toward the town I came to a wide street, stretching 
straight up the hill. On either side were stone pavements, crowded with negroes; 
colored children gamboled on the flags ; colored mammas smoked pipes in the 
doorways of shops, where colored fathers sold apples, beer, and whiskey ; col- 
ored damsels, with baskets of clean linen in their stout arms, joked with colored 
boatmen from the canal ; colored draymen cursed and pounded their mules ; 
and colored laborers on the streets enveloped one in a cloud of suffocating 
dust as he hastened by. Toward the water sloped other streets lined with roomy 
tobacco warehouses; half-way up the hill a broad and well-built business avenue 
crossed at right angles, and there, at last, one saw white people, and the ordinary 
sights of a city. 

Finally I came into an open air market, picturesque as any in Italy or Spam. 
On the curbing of the sidewalk, and even on the stones in the middle of the 
square, dozens of negro women were seated before baskets containing vegetables, 
or various goods of trivial description. One venerable matron, weighing perhaps 
200 pounds, had her profuse chignon overtopped by a dilapidated beaver, and 
was smoking a clay pipe. Many young women were cleanly and nicely dressed, 
and had folded back the huge flaps of their starched sun-bonnets, so that they 
seemed to imitate the head-dresses of the Italian maidens at Sorrento. Hosts 



'OLD LYNCHBURG. 



555 



of colored buyers, market-baskets in hand, hovered from one seller to another, 
talking in high-pitched voices, and in a dialect which Northern ears found diffi- 
cult to understand. Leaving the market, and yet ascending, I came to another 
broad street lined with comfortable dwellings, and looking up saw, still far above 
me, the " Court-House" perched on the topmost point. 

Lynchburg lies among the mountains, on the south bank of the James 
river, nearly in the centre of the Piedmont district of Virginia, and not far from 
the base of the Blue Ridge. The Virginians of all sections speak affectionately 
of it as "Old Lynchburg." It was once the wealthiest city in the United States, 
in proportion to its population, and one of the most remarkable tobacco marts in 
the world. Colossal fortunes were amassed and enjoyed there, in the days when 
internal revenue was not, and slave labor tilled the fields. Then the products of 
the Virginia and North Carolina plantations filled its warehouses and manufac- 




A Side Street in Lynchburg, Virginia. 

tories to bursting, and all Europe came to buy. An Irish emigrant gave his 
name, in 1786, to the town; and the famous term "Lynch law," now so uni- 
versal, sprang from the summary manner in which this hot-headed Hibernian — 
a colonel in the Revolutionary army — treated such tories as were caught by him. 
During the late war the town did not fall into Federal hands. The tide of war 
flowed all around it, but never mounted to the reddish hills where it had 
safely perched. 

Lynchburg's great natural advantages of situation will, in a few years, increase 
it from a city of 12,000 population to a huge overcrowded railway centre. It 
possesses superb and abundant water power. Coal is to be had in the immediate 
neighborhood cheaper than in most of the other cities in the Atlantic States. 



55& THE LOCATION AND TRADE OF LYNCHBURG. 

Two important railway lines intersect at Lynchburg, the Atlantic, Mississippi and 
Ohio, now connecting Norfolk on the Atlantic with Memphis on the Mississippi, 
and destined also to connect Norfolk with Louisville on the Ohio ; and the Wash- 
ington City, Virginia Midland and Great Southern road which connects from 
Alexandria, in North-eastern Virginia, with Danville in the southern part of the 
State, and forms a link in the great Air Line between the cities on the Gulf and 
New York. The latter road opens to Lynchburg the whole Piedmont district, so 
rich in grains, grasses, fruits, tobacco, minerals and timber. The James river 
and Kanawha canal now extends from tide-water at Richmond, about 200 miles 
through the centre of the State, to a point near the base of the Alleghanies, but 
if carried to the Ohio, by means of liberal improvements in the Kanawha river, 
would revolutionize American internal commerce. This canal winds in pleasant 
curves between green banks through the mountains and at the base of the 
Lynchburg hills ; and the horn of the boatmen is heard, making cheery melody 
at sunset. It was a grand mistake to locate the canal on the river-level. Peo- 
ple have grown somewhat wiser since 1841, when the route was opened to 
navigation, and now regret that they did not place it high enough to secure 
the water power. The Chesapeake and Ohio rail route runs a little to the 
north of Lynchburg. 

Finding the old town standing so " amid the fertile lands," with such excel- 
lent chances for growth, the new-comer feels, at first, like reproaching its 
inhabitants, despite the shock which they received in the war, for want of enter- 
prise. But a careful examination shows that Lynchburg boasts a considerable 
activity. It has thirty-five tobacco factories, employing great numbers of 
negroes, men, women, and children. These negroes earn good wages, work 
faithfully, and turn out vast quantities of the black, ugly compound known as 
" plug," which has enslaved so many thousands, and promoted such a sublime 
disregard for the proprieties in the matter of expectoration. The appended 
note will give an idea of the trade of the tobacco district of which Lynchburg 
is the centre.* In the manufactories the negro is the same cheery, capricious • 
being that one finds him in the cotton or sugar-cane fields ; he sings quaintly 
over his toil, and seems entirely devoid of the sullen ambition which many of our 
Northern factory laborers exhibit. The men and women working around the • 
tables in the basements of the Lynchburg tobacco establishments croon eccentric 
hymns in concert all day long; and their little children, laboring before they 

*A comparative statement of the tax paid on manufactured tobacco shipped from the Fifth 
District of Virginia, in the fiscal years of 1871-72 and 1872-73, show that during the first period 
the amount manufactured was 5,351,894 pounds, on which was paid a tax of $1,501,526; and for 
the latter period 10,774,611 pounds, on which the taxation amounted to $2,154,922.20. The 
total weight of tobacco, in hogsheads, in boxes, and "loose," inspected at Lynchburg from Octo- 
ber 1, 1870, to October 1, 1871, was 17,425,439 pounds, of which 11,629,239 pounds were brought 
in loose or unpacked; and for the same period in 1871-72 the total weight was 14,323,708 
pounds, more than 10,000,000 pounds of which quantity was brought in unpacked. Campbell, 
Bedford, Pittsylvania, Halifax, Charlotte, Appomattox, Amherst, Nelson, Rockbridge, Botetourt, 
Roanoke, Franklin, Montgomery, Giles, Washington, Floyd, and Mercer counties furnish most 
of the tobacco received at Lynchburg. 



THE LACK OF CHANGE IN VIRGINIA. 557 

are hardly large enough to go alone, join in the refrains. Tobacco is the 
main article of Lynchburg trade. Buyers from all parts of the Union crowd 
the streets ; the warehouses are daily visited by throngs. Other manufactures 
are slowly creeping in, and the venerable town will probably yet do its share 
in developing the iron so profusely scattered through South-western Virginia. 
Lynchburg stands in the centre of a region richly supplied with educational 
institutions. Within a radius of sixty miles Roanoke and Hampden-Sidney 
Colleges, the Virginia Military Institute, the University of Virginia, and the 
Washington - Lee University, are all situated. Its own public and private 
schools are numerous and of excellent character. The Virginian and the 
other Lynchburg newspapers hold high rank among the journals of the State. 




Scene in a Lynchburg Tobacco Factory. 

The annual fairs of the Agricultural and Mechanical Society bring together 
hundreds of farmers from all parts of the commonwealth. 

Down the steep hills every day come the country wagons (often with a bull, 
a mule, and an old mare harnessed together as the team), loaded with the dark 
sheaves of tobacco ; and the groups of men standing about the parks and public 
places are almost certain to be discussing the favorite staple. 

Something of the old Scotch and English manners are still perceptible among 
the people in this part of Virginia ; and there are bits of dialect and phrase 
which show how little the communities have been affected during the last century 
by the influences which have so transformed the populations of other sections 
of America. While England has gone on from change to change, and has even 
been capable of complete revolution in certain matters, Virginia has altered but 
little. Until now immigration has had no inducements to come and unlock the 



558 



SOUTH-WESTERN VIRGINIA. 



■ >„ : ^-- 




"Down the steep hills every day come the country wagons." [Page 557.] 



treasure-house of the grand mountains of the South-west, and so the people 
have lived under pretty much the same laws and customs that prevailed in 
England two centuries ago. Yet the absence of the rushing, turbulent current of 
immigration has had its compensating advantages in allowing the growth of 

families in which the 
hereditary love of culture 
and refinement, and the 
strictest attention to those 
graces and courtesies 
which always distinguish 
a pure and dignified soci- 
ety, are preeminently 
conspicuous. 

South-western Vir- 
ginia is a region which 
will in time be overrun 
by tourists and land spec- 
ulators. The massive 
ramparts of the Allegha- 
nies are pierced here and 
there by cuts through 
which crawls the line of 
the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio railroad ; and towns are springing up with 
almost Western rapidity. Stores of coal and iron are daily brought to light; 
and the farmer of the old regime stares with wonder, not wholly unmixed with 
jealousy, at the smart new-comers who are agitating the subject of branch rail- 
roads, and searching into the very entrails of the hills. 

The sea-board link of the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio railroad was orig- 
inally known as the Norfolk and Petersburg road, and was completed in 1858, 
under the direction of William Mahone, an engineer of decided talent. At the 
close of the war this line, as well as the Southside, running from Petersburg to 
Lynchburg, and the Virginia and Tennessee road, extending from Lynchburg 
to Bristol, were in a lamentable condition, having been completely worn down 
by the heavy traffic and constant wear and tear during the great civil struggle. 
A measure for the consolidation of these roads, and their rebuilding and 
thorough equipment as a grand inter- State highway, was brought before the 
Virginia Legislature, and became the subject of much discussion. The engineer, 
Mahone, had been for many years prominent in the railway affairs of the com- 
monwealth, and was now the foremost advocate of the unification measure. 
He had also been a brilliant fighter on the Confederate side, had gone 
through the struggle to the bitter end, standing by Lee at Appomattox, 
and, as in the battle years he had been impetuous, persistent, and unsparing 
of self, so now, in the pursuit of this great scheme for a route from Norfolk 
to the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, he was characterized by the same 
qualities. 



TPLE ATLANTIC, MISSISSIPPI AND OHIO RAILROAD. 559 

Ever since George Washington plainly pointed out the advantages of a route 
between the Atlantic coast and the Ohio river, the attention of Virginian states- 
manship has been directed to the subject ; but it remained for General Mahone, 
with his clear logic and irresistible array of facts, to exercise the influence which 
finally brought about the needed legislation, and on the 12th of November, 
1870, resulted in the organization of the present line, merging together the 
Norfolk and Petersburg, the " Southside," the Virginia and Tennessee, and the 
Virginia and Kentucky railroads. 

By this there were placed under one management five hundred miles of rail- 
road lying upon the best and shortest location afforded by the continent between 
the centres of Western trade and the finest harbors on the Atlantic sea-board. 
This continuous line, running east and west between the extreme western border 
of the State and the sea-board, will bestow its trade within, and confer its benefits 
upon, towns and cities in the limits of Virginia; and by building up large centres, 
will gradually reduce the rate of taxation levied upon the agricultural population. 
In its completed form it will be, in the words of a distinguished Virginian, "a 
line which spans one-half the continent at its narrowest breadth, which begins at 
that point of the very sea-board nearest the western trade centre, and reaches out 
not only to the proper west in its middle, but also to the north-west and the 
south-west " — -a line, in fact, which will make the Atlantic via Norfolk 351 miles 
nearer Louisville, 260 miles nearer Cincinnati, and 400 miles nearer Cairo, than 
via New York city. Traversing the most prosperous and fertile portion of Vir- 
ginia, it diverges at Bristol, to penetrate, by means of its present and future con- 
nections, the entire South and South-west, and via Cumberland Gap, the State of 
Kentucky and the huge North-west. The three railroads now composing this 
main line were placed under the management of General Mahone as early as 
1869 (he having been successively chosen president of each one), but they con- 
tinued for some time afterward to act under their separate charters.* 

* In 1866-67, before the three lines above-mentioned were placed under one general man- 
agement, the number of tons transported upon them was 145,000. During the year ending 
September 30, 1872, the amount transported by the consolidated line was 205,000 tons. In 
1866-67, the average charge per ton per mile was five and a-quarter cents; in 1871-72 it was 
two and three-fourth cents. This great reduction of rate was followed by an increase of revenue 
from $1,000,000, in 1866-67, to $1,969,000 in 1871-72, and for 1872-73, to over $2,000,000. 
The Norfolk and Petersburg road was in active operation as an independent road in i860. Its 
entire revenue for that fiscal year was $96,621.74. That same division of the consolidated road 
earned for the year ending September 30, 1872, $376,531. The cotton transported over this 
route all goes to Norfolk, except that taken by the Petersburg and Richmond mills, which yearly 
increases in amount. The number of bales carried in 1871-72 was 130,000; in 1872-73, 177,000, 
coming mainly from Memphis, Selma, Nashville, Huntsville and Dalton. Some of the other, 
and no less important, fruits of the consolidation measure are seen in the following statistics: In 
1866-67 the quantity of minerals transported was but 13,000 tons; in 1871-72 it was 31,000 
tons. In 1866-67, the weight of live stock moved was 3,000 tons; in 1871-72 it was 15,000. 
The contrast in the amount of wheat is still more striking: it has increased from 17,000 
bushels in 1866-67, to 263,000 bushels in 1871-72. In this same latter year there were deliv- 
ered to Virginia cities 88,000 tons of agricultural and mineral products, and 47,000 tons were 
sent North. 



$6o 



SIGHTS IN LYNCHBURG. 



The traveler who hastens through Lynchburg, repelled by the uncouth and 
prosaic surroundings of the railway station, will lose real- pleasure. A residence 
of a few days in the old town will show him much that is novel and interesting. 
He may wander along the beautiful banks of the James below Lynchburg; 
by the canal whereon the gayly-painted boats slip merrily to their destination ; 
or he may climb the steep hills behind the town, and get a glimpse of the 
winding stream which looks like a silver thread among the blue mountains. 
At noontide he may hear the mellow notes of the horn by which buyers are 
summoned to a tobacco sale ; and at sunset he may watch the curious groups 
of negroes returning from their labors singing and chattering, or noisily dis- 
puting some momentous political issue. 







Summoning Buyers to a Tobacco Sale. 



LXII. 



IN SOUTH-WESTERN VIRGINIA — THE PEAKS OF OTTER. 
THE MINERAL SPRINGS. 



IT was in the brilliant early autumn that I visited South-western Virginia. 
Leaving Lynchburg, just at sunset, for the mountains beyond, I was 
impressed with the beauty of the soft light which gently rested upon the lovely 
stream, and was gradually losing itself in the mysterious twilight. The foliage 
' was at its completest still ; the gay loungers at the pretty little fashion-resorts 
scattered through the mountains were giving their sprightliest balls before 
retiring to the solitude and routine of their plantations. The tobacco-fields were 
yet resplendent with green. The farmers were fallowing the lands on the rich 
hill-sides for winter wheat. Every day the sun shone with inspiring splendor on 
the blue lines of monarch mountains, which, clothed in their beautiful forests, 
reared their crests against the un- 
clouded sky. I did not wander along 
the winding canal, in the recesses of 
the hills, as far as the famous " Natural 
Bridge," but he who wishes to inspect 
that massive arch, spanning the chasm 
in which flows the little stream called 
Cedar creek, can reach it by a night's 
journey along the canal, from Lynch- 
burg to the mouth of Cedar creek, 
within two miles of the bridge. The 
route, on a moonlit evening, is delight- 
ful, as the banks of the canal afford a 
constant succession of beautiful 
mountain pictures. But we leave the 
description of the approach to the 
bridge, and the great monumental 
wonder's special characteristics, to the 
pen of a native Virginian : 

" The first view of the bridge is ob- 
tained half a mile from it, at a turn on 
the stage - road. It is revealed with 
the suddenness of an apparition. Raised a hundred feet above the highest 
trees of the forest, and revealed against the purple side of a distant mount- 
ain, a whitish -gray arch is seen, in the effect of distance as perfect and 




Evening nn the James River — " The soft light which 
gently rested upon the lovely stream." 



562 



THE "NATURAL BRIDGE" OF VIRGINIA. 



clean-cut an arch as its Egyptian inventor could have denned. The tops 
of trees are waving in the interval, the upper half of which we only see, 
and the stupendous arch that spans the upper air is relieved from the first 
impression that it is man's masonry, the work of art, by the fifteen or twenty 

feet of soil that it supports, 
in which trees and shrub- 
bery are firmly imbedded 
— the verdant crown and 
testimony of Nature's great 
work. And here we are 
divested of an imagination 
which we believe is popular, 
that the bridge is merely 
a huge slab of rock thrown 
across a chasm, or some 
such hasty and violent 
arrangement. It is no 
such thing. The arch and 
whole interval are con- 
tained in one solid rock ; 
the average width of that 
which makes the bridge is 
eighty feet, and beyond 
this the rock extends for a 
hundred feet or so in 
mural precipices, divided 
by only a single fissure, 

In the Gap of the Peaks of Otter, Virginia. that makes & natural pier 

on the upper side of the bridge, and up which climb the hardy firs, ascending 
step by step on the noble rock-work till they overshadow you. 

"This mighty rock, sunk in the earth's side, of which even what appears 
is stupendous, is of limestone, covered to the depth of from four to six 
feet with alluvial and clayey earth. The span of the arch runs from forty- 
five to sixty feet wide, and its height to the under line is one hundred 
and ninety-six feet, and to the head two hundred and fifteen feet. The 
form of the arch approaches the elliptical ; the stage - road which passes 
over the bridge runs from north to south, with an acclivity of 35 degrees, 
and the arch is carried over on a diagonal line, the very line of all others 
most difficult for the architect to realize, and that best calculated for pict- 
uresque effect." 

Promising myself a visit to the Natural Bridge in the future, I made all 
speed to the other wonder of the neighborhood — the keen, sublime and 
haughty "Peaks of Otter." 

Tenderly outlined against the exquisite pearl gray of the morning sky was the 
Blue Ridge, as I looked at it from the windows of the little inn of Liberty, the 




GOING TO THE "PEAKS OF OTTER." 563 

shire town of Bedford county, the point of departure for the Peaks of Otter. I 
noticed but little life or activity in the long street on Liberty hill; some negroes 
were at work in one or two tobacco warehouses ; farmers were bustling in on 
the red country roads leading toward the purplish hill-background ; and miles 
away two sharp, yet symmetrical peaks, connected by a gap, perched high up 
on the Blue Ridge chain, sprang into view. 

There were the mighty twins ! Two splendid guardians of the sweet valley 
spread out at their bases, they rose in indescribable grandeur. Where they 
take root in the gradually ascending earth, a capricious creek, the Otter, 
from which they get their name, eddies and bubbles and ripples in poetic confu- 
sion through rich fields, and by humble farm-dwellings, and granaries fashioned 
from the mountain trees. The northern and highest peak is rarely visited ; it 
rises 5,307 feet above the level of the sea. The other, more symmetrical in 
shape, — something like an enormous pyramid, and capped by a chaotic mass of 
rock reaching seemingly into the clouds, — we determined to scale. 

The negro livery-man had promised us a "hack," and consequently arrived 
with a red spring- wagon, perched high upon four clumsy, wheels, and drawn by 
two unambitious horses. The road, for a mile or two after leaving Liberty, was 
good ; then we fell upon the ordinary back-country route in Virginia, which is 
simply abominable. Square brick mansions with an air of solid respectability, 
standing in the middle of green and well-kept lawns, occupied the environs of 
the town ; but we gradually left them, and passing through stretches of forest, 
along the beds of dissolute creeks which seemed determined not to go in the 
narrow way accorded them by nature, and by fields rich in culture, and abound- 
ing in delicious foliage, we began to climb around the mountain base. 

We followed a vagrant road skulking apparently away from the sun. Now 
the road huddled under oaks, and now scurried up a thinly-wooded slope ; now 
toiled over masses of loose stones ; now coursed majestically along a plateau 
whence one could see the valley spread out like a map ; now catching a glimpse 
of the overhanging peak toward which we toiled, and then, as if frightened at 
it, entered the wood forthwith. The cabins by the way were rude ; rail-fences, 
chin high, through which white-headed children peered suspiciously, ran by the 
front doors ; near which the cow-yards were conspicuous. Log barns were 
partially filled with hay, while tobacco hung from the rafters. Glancing upward, 
we could frequently see the pinnacle apparently suspended in mid-air. It 
seemed remote from, and disconnected with, the hill up to which we toiled, 
frowning upon us like a giant spectre. 

At last, reaching the gap, more than three thousand feet above sea-level, we 
saw before us a pyramid of rough soil thickly sown with trees, and dotted with 
cabins in a few clearings. On the right, the northern peak showed its wooded 
sides, where the bear still wanders undisturbed ; and a little in front of us 
stood the primitive hotel surrounded by flourishing orchards. The vine grows 
with surprising luxuriance along these mountains, the dry air and genial 
warmth giving every encouragement for the largest experimenting in vine- 
yards. 



564 



THE OUTLOOK FROM THE SUMMIT. 



We now began gradually to master the ascent, and after half an hour 
of painful climbing over rudest roads, and a long scramble up an almost per- 
pendicular hill-side, we came to a point in the forest where a high rock 
seemed to offer an impassable barrier ; but around which led a path on a 
narrow ledge. We stumbled forward, and dizzy with the effort, stood on the 
summit. 

Jagged and irregular masses of rock projected over a tremendous abyss, 
into which we hardly dared to look. A strong wind blew steadily across the 
height. We could not help fancying that some of the masses of stone, appa- 

^»s rently so tightly sus- 
pended, might fall and 
crush us. Under the great 
dome of the translucent 
sky we stood trembling, 
shut off from the lower 
world, and poised on a 
narrow pinnacle, from 
which we might at any 
moment, by an unwary 
step, be hurled down. An 
old stone cabin, which had 
once served as the lodging 
for such adventurous per- 
sons as desired to see sun- 
rise from the peak, but 
which had been partially 
destroyed during the war, 
was perched on one of the 
corners of the mighty crag ; 
from it a slender board was 
laid to a sharp corner in 
the uppermost cliff, and up 
that we scrambled. Then, 
making our way on to 
the topmost stone, we 
gazed down on the valley 



JUT**" Wi 

The Summit of the Peak of Otter, Virginia 

of Virginia. In front of us, looking over fertile Bedford county, it seemed a 
garden ; from point to point gleamed the spires and roofs of villages ; mount- 
ains of every imaginable shape rose on all sides ; and the forests at the edges 
of the gaps in the Blue Ridge seemed delicatest fringes of purple. We could 
trace the massive and curving ranges of the Alleghanies, and the rudely- 
gullied sides of the nearest peaks. Their reddish soil, showing up strongly 
under the bright sun, produced a magical effect. Nowhere were the adjacent 
peaks, however, so near as to lessen the sublime illusion of seeming suspen- 
sion in mid- air, produced by our climb to the highest rock of the peak. The 




PRICES OF LAND TAXES. 565 

cabins along the roads below looked like black dots ; the men at work in the 
fields like ants. From the rocky throne one seemed to have the whole map 
of Virginia spread out before him ; and the backbone of the Alleghanies 
appeared but as a toy which one might stride over, or displace at will. 

Talks with the farmers and business men along the roads were full of informa- 
tion encouraging to would-be immigrants. Titles to land are usually good, because 
the estates rarely changed owners before the war, but descended from father to 
son, and one can more readily trace the title in Virginia on that account than in 
most of the other Southern States. The prices of farms in the south-western 
section of the State, although somewhat influenced by local causes, and, there- 
fore, a little perplexing to the stranger, are reasonably low. Land of the best 
quality can be had at from $40 to $80 per acre, and the ridges of the mountains 
for almost nothing. The present prices there are, on the whole, an advance on 
the old ones. 

In Rockbridge, Botetourt, and Roanoke counties, all surprisingly rich in re- 
sources, lands have declined in value so that they may be purchased at excel- 
lent bargains. In the Upper Piedmont counties prices are variable, but under 
the impetus given them by a steady English immigration show a tendency to 
rise. In Bedford, Amherst, Nelson, Campbell, and Appomattox counties, there 
are thousands of acres of good grazing and fruit-lands to be bought for from 
$2 to $5 per acre ; while farms of the best quality, easily accessible to market, 
are sold at from $10 to $30. In the James River valley great numbers of slaves 
were held before the war. Emancipation ruined hundreds of planters and 
farmers, and caused a decline in the price of the lands. Many a fine old 
colonial estate is in the market at a small sum. The bottom lands in this 
attractive valley have been cultivated for two centuries, but are still fertile 
and unexhausted.. The staples in the hill-country in the vicinity of Lynch- 
burg are mainly wheat, Indian corn, oats, hay, and tobacco. The fruits are 
unrivaled, and along the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge mountains the 
grape flourishes luxuriantly, and needs no protection from the cold. The 
farmers in the James River valley say that the bottom lands there will yield 
from sixty to one hundred bushels of corn to the acre. 

The taxes are not heavy. On real estate in the counties they amount to one 
per cent, and the property is usually rated at only two-thirds of its cash value. 
Negro farm labor can be engaged for from $8 to $12 per month, with board; but 
"board" means only rations of bacon, molasses and corn, which the negro is 
supposed to cook for himself. In the forests of the hill-country black- walnut, 
cherry, and maple abound, and the oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, and pine are 
spread over one-half of the counties of the Piedmont section. Here and there 
one notices rank growths of pines, poplars and locusts, which have sprung up 
on the neglected land, whose owners have no longer capital to employ in cul- 
tivation. There is a statutory provision allowing each head of a family to hold, 
exempt from any process of execution or levy, real and personal property to 
the amount of $2,000. One-fifth of the tax money is devoted to the uses of 
free schools ; but I am inclined to believe that in back sections of most of the 



566 



BLUE RIDGE SPRINGS. 



counties these schools do not flourish to any extent — not so much because of 
any hostility toward them as because of the general apathy of the native farm- 
ing population on the subject of education. 

At every town throughout this region there are lovely mountain views. One 
has lost sight of the twin peaks of Otter ere he arrives at Blue Ridge Springs, 
a charming resort ensconced in a nook between two huge ridges, situated upon 
the railroad, and connected with the outer world by telegraph and numerous 
daily trains, the waters being noted for their efficacy in special cases. The route 
continues through a rich farming country, and passes hill-sides covered with flour- 
ishing vineyards. -The farmers on the ridges are quiet and well-disposed folk. 
Corn-fields grow up to the very doors of their humble houses. The negroes 





Blue Ridge Springs, South-western Virginia. 

have little patches of land here and there, and seem industrious in their cultiva- 
tion. Chalybeate and sulphur springs are the attractions around which revolves, 
all summer long, a pleasant coterie from the extreme South. The whole spring 
region of this section of Virginia is crowded from July until the last of October 
with Southern visitors. 

The mountain-passes about Blue Ridge Springs, the delightful roads running 
out from thence to Coyner's and Bonsack's, the lovely stretches of the Roanoke 
valley, the mystic recesses of the hills about "Alleghany," the sweet tranquillity 
of the "Montgomery White Sulphur," and the half-dozen other retreats in the 
vicinity, are all sought by the overworked and climate- worn who have come thou- 



ALLEGHANY SPRINGS. 5 67 

sands of miles for a sniff of fresh air. The railroad, seeking a way through the 
most practicable passes of the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge, has established 
stations convenient to all these springs. For fifty miles the Atlantic, Mississippi 
and Ohio route runs through a wild and romantic section, abounding in richest 
mineral springs, as well as in minerals of value. The most noticeable of the 
fashionable resorts are the "Alleghany" and the "Montgomery White." Both 
have long been famous among Southerners; and hundreds of Northern pleasure- 
seekers now yearly find their way there. 

Alleghany Springs, in Montgomery county, are near the Roanoke river, at 
the eastern foot of the Alleghany mountains. The hotel, surrounded by a chain 
of picturesque and comfortable cottages, is only three miles from the railroad, 
and in all directions there are ravines and recesses containing some of the 
great wonders which Nature has so lavishly scattered through the State. The 
saline waters which are abundant at Alleghany draw around them hosts of 
invalids, and the more robust visitors find health and pleasure in the exploration 
of such rocky canons as Puncheon Run Falls, where, through the rent side of 
the hills a foamy series of cascades leap down 2,000 feet into abysses, shrouded 
in leaves and vines, where the black mosses cling to the blacker rocks; where 
the laurel sways rhythmically to the music of the spray and the sombre refrain 
of the fall. He who would see billowy mountains, rolling miles and miles 
away, should climb to "Fisher's View," at a short distance from Alleghany. 
Along the by-ways of this region he will meet the rustic, clad in homespun, 
with an ancient rifle slung at his shoulder, and will be surprised at his uncouth 
speech and quaint suspicions of the traveler. The mountaineer looks scornfully 
upon the crowds of city butterflies who flit back and forth through his country 
retreats in summer, and stands, dumb with amazement, before the doors of the 
hotel ball-room, through which he sees the gleam of rich costumes and the sparkle 
of jewels. 

The routine at all the springs is much the same. The hotel is usually a 
roomy building, surrounded by porches or verandas, and stands in the middle of 
a green lawn, dotted with the white oak or some other of the superb trees 
abounding in the Virginian, mountains. In the hotel are grouped the ball and 
dining-rooms and the general reception parlors; while in the small, neatly-painted, 
one-story cottages, ranged in rows, equidistant from the hotel, the visitors are 
lodged. There is a host of attentive and polite colored serving-men and 
women, ex-valets and ex-nurses of the " before-the-war " epoch, and they will 
tell you, with pardonable pride, "I used to belong to ole Mars' ," men- 
tioning some name famous in the annals of slave proprietorship. Here one 
can establish the charm and seclusion of a home, and combine with it the 
benefits accruing from a sojourn at a watering-place. Society, usually very 
good, crystallizes in the parlors of the hotels and in the ball-rooms, where 
bands of colored musicians discourse the latest themes of Strauss and Gungl. 
When one tires of dancing and of the promenades to the "springs," there 
are the mountains, and the strolls along ridges thousands of feet above the 
level of the sea, where the air is always pure and inspiring. There is no gam 



568 THE "MONTGOMERY WHITE SULPHUR." 

ing, save an innocent whist party by some sleepy old boys who lurk in the 
porches, keeping out of the strong morning sun; there is no Saratogian route of 
carriage and drag; no crowded street, with ultra style predominant in every 
costume ; nothing but simplicity, sensible enjoyment, and excellent taste. In 
the sunny mornings the ladies and their cavaliers wander about the mountain 
pathways; dress does not exact homage until dinner-time, and the children 
join with their parents in the strolls and promenades, followed by the vener- 
able ''aunties," black and fat, who seem indispensable appendages to every 
Southern family having young children. 

Montgomery White Sulphur Springs lie even nearer to the main route of 
travel than those of Alleghany. A pleasant ride of a mile and a-half from 
the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio line, on a horse -railroad brings one to a lawn, 
planted round about with fine trees, and watered by a rippling brook. The 
hotel and cottage buildings are comfortable and elegant; the sulphur and 
chalybeate springs are daily visited by hundreds in the season ; and the ragged 
spur of the Alleghanies which backs the lawn is traversed by smooth, well- 
kept roads, over which visitors trot on the brisk mountain horses. At the 
season's height Southern statesmen, lawyers, planters, journalists, ex-warriors, 
poets and speculators make the Montgomery White their rendezvous ; and 
illuminations, balls, tournaments and meetings follow one upon the other. 
Four miles south-west are the " Yellow Sulphur Springs," loftily situated near 
the head- waters of the Roanoke, and reached from the railway via Christians- 
burg. These springs, whose waters are celebrated for the cure of children's 
diseases, and are said to impart a rare purity to the complexion of women, 
are noted as a quiet resort for families. 

This spring region, abounding in all the resources for the restoration of 
health and energy, and so rich in natural beauty, is as yet comparatively 
unknown to the mass of Northern and Western people. For cheapness of price 
and for convenience of access it has in America hardly an equal ; and in 
Europe but few watering-places can claim any superior advantages of that 
nature. When the great commonwealth is thoroughly developed, these beau- 
tiful summer resorts will gradually become large towns, and the charm of the 
restful stillness, the possibility of intimate communion with some of nature's 
grandest phases which they now afford, will be gone. The mob of the sum- 
mer grand tour will rob them of their chief charm. 



LXIII. 



AMONG THE MOUNTAINS — FROM BRISTOL TO LYNCHBURG. 

A JOURNEY from the Tennessee line, northward toward Lynchburg, gave 
me enlarged ideas of the possibilities of South-western Virginia. Bristol 
bestrides the line between Virginia and Tennessee, and consequently has a 
double municipal existence. Two Mayors and two sets of minor municipal 
officers have jurisdiction within its limits. It is a pretty collection of neat houses 
and busy shops, ranged along lightly-sloping hills ; and beyond the Tennessee 
boundary, the blue range of the Iron mountains stands out sharply against the 
clear sky. 

The streets are usually crowded with wagon-trains, immense canvas-covered 
vehicles, drawn by sober mules, and driven by brawny, long-bearded backwoods- 




Bristol, South-western Virginia. 

men, or by tattered and slouching negroes. These trains ply back and forth 
along the difficult routes not yet reached by any railways, and at night the men 
and mules camp together under the open sky. Stout farmers, splashed with the 
reddish mud of the highways, rattle up and down the main avenues on alert little 
horses. At evening the through train from New Orleans, bound for New York, 
shrieks the note of warning as it rolls into the overcrowded depot, and the pas- 
sengers pour out to the roomy, old-fashioned brick hotel, and, seated on wooden 
stools around a long table, absorb the smoking fragments of hot chicken and 
corn-bread set before them. Here and there the noise of factory wheels is heard, 
and the hills are crowned with neat edifices containing flourishing schools. On 
the Tennessee side stands King's College, supported by the Presbyterian Church 
South, and there are also one or two excellent seminaries for women. 

The i, 800 people settled at Bristol seem prosperous and contented, as they 
may well be, in view of the chances for future growth which the rapid multipli- 



57o 



THE NATURAL TUNNEL. 



cation of railway lines with important connections is to give the town. The 
extension of the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio railroad from Bristol to Cumber- 
land Gap will develop a rich country ; and when Bristol is receiving the great 
currents of traffic directly from Memphis and Louisville, it will fully merit the 





W± ¥ 



White Top Mountain, seen from Glade Springs. 

title now and then given it, of "the most active town in Virginia." The 
" Natural Tunnel," forty-two miles from Bristol, near the ford of the Clinch 
river, is a passage, about 800 feet in length, through battlements of solid stone. 
The vaults of the tunnel rise to the height of eighty feet ; and, where the arch 
finally terminates in the mountain slope, there is a sheer precipice 500 feet high. 
In a few years, it is confidently expected, a railroad will find its way through this 
wonderful tunnel, and the locomotive's scream will be heard on the path over 
which Daniel Boone painfully toiled, more than a century ago, on his pioneering 
pilgrimage to* the Kentucky wilds. Straight across Powell's mountain and 
Powell's valley to the rock-ribbed Cumberland range runs the projected route of 
the railway which is to forge one more link in the great chain binding the West 
to the East. The whole region adjacent to the main road leading to Cumberland 
Gap is rich in tradition and natural wonders. Not far from the Natural Tunnel 
is a massive cave, in whose chambers hang thousands of stalactites ; and near the 
little town of Estillville, in Scott county, are the " Holston Springs," where 
chalybeate, thermal and white sulphur waters rise from sources within a few 
hand-breadths of each other. Around Estillville the lands are rich in minerals ; 
iron and copper abound ; and the lead deposits along the Clinch river have long 
been considered remarkable. 

The journey backward toward Lynchburg took me through Abingdon, a 
flourishing trade centre in Washington county, and to Glade Springs, whence one 



SALTVILLE, VIRGINIA. 



571 



gets a peep at White Top mountain's lofty brow. From Glade Springs I turned 
aside to Saltville, a busy town connected with the outer world by a branch rail- 
road running in among the queer hill-knobs filled with plaster, and through the 
valleys where salt-wells are sunk. The country round about, until one reaches 
the Alleghany ridge, is not unlike that portion of England lying near Eastbourne, 
with its chalk hills sparsely covered with grass. Saltville is a neat manufact- 
uring village, nestling in a valley near a defile in Walker's mountain. The basin 
of salt-water there yields nearly eighty per cent., and, ever since a Scotchman 
named King opened a well in 1780, the salines have been extensively worked. 
During the last war the Confederacy depended almost entirely upon these works 
for salt, and the tremendous draft of ten thousand bushels per day was promptly 
met by the wells. About two thousand men were constantly employed ; the 
town was thoroughly fortified ; each Southern State had its private establish- 
ment, and the various furnaces are to-day known by the names of the States 
which originally established them. There was some savage fighting along the 
mountain-sides, and in the defiles, when General Stoneman tried to force his way 
into Saltville and destroy the precious stores ; but, after a severe repulse, he 
succeeded in gaining possession and burning everything. The stock company 
now owning and working the wells, manufacture but three thousand bushels of 
salt daily, sending it mainly to the Southern markets. 



ilMp 




Making Salt, at Saltville, Virginia. 



The stout negroes working over the boiling salt were both delighted arid 
amazed when their pictures appeared in the artist's sketch-book ; they had never 
seen "no such writin' befo'." Great stores of gypsum are annually mined and 
prepared for fertilizers in this valley, where also there are some superb model 

37 



572 A CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL MEETING.. 

farms, well stocked and separated one from another by beautiful hedges. Not 
far from Saltville is Clinch mountain, over which the traveler to Tazewell county, 
a wonderfully beautiful mountain region, must climb. The fighting around 
Saltville was severest at the time that Burbridge came from Kentucky, intending 
to break up the Confederate works there. It was, I believe, the first fight in 
which colored troops entered as an important element, and the slaughter of 
them, as they came struggling up the difficult hill-sides, is said by eye-witnesses 
to have been dreadful. About six thousand troops were engaged on each 
side. 

In Tazewell county, twenty-five miles from the line of the Atlantic, Missis- 
sippi and Ohio road, coal crops out literally everywhere. It furnishes a rich 
field for investment. The mountain population is rude, but, as a rule, law- 
abiding, and sensible. Along the valley of the Clinch river, in this county, 
are many stretches of fertile fields, contrasting strangely with the rocky cliffs 
rising around them. " Wolf Creek Knob," clad in laurel and ivy, and "Dial 
Rock," near Jeffersonville, are worthy many visits. Railroads, schools and mines 
will give this country great riches, and a much needed increase of education 
in a few years. The dialect of the people is strange and hard ; their hospi- 
tality is unbounded, and their love for the peaks, among which they raise 
their droves of cattle, horses, and hogs, amounts to devotion. Their homes 
are cleanly, although simple almost beyond belief; their manners are frank, 
and their instincts usually noble. 

At Marion Court-House — a pleasant village near the Brush mountain, and 
a fair type of the average Virginian county seat, — we arrived at a time when the 
Conservative candidate for Governor of the State, General Kemper, was address- 
ing the citizens of the county. Marion consists mainly of one long street, on 
one side of which is the Court-House, with a lawn in front, and a stout jail in the 
rear. It was court-day as well as a political occasion ; and the farmers had 
assembled from many miles around. 

The negroes are very numerous in the vicinage ; but, constituting a party by 
themselves, did not flock about the Court-House, although two of the better class 
of them lingered near, as if appointed as reporters. The court-room in which 
the political meeting was held, after the session of the court had been adjourned 
over for a day in deference to the discussion of pending issues, was small and des- 
titute of seats. The farmers and town residents dropped in at intervals during 
the lucid and fluent speech made by General Kemper, and listened for some 
little time with respectful attention, although they did not seem to take that 
thrilling interest in the irrepressible conflict which I had been led to expect. 

The speeches of the candidate (since elected Governor) and his friends were 
somewhat condemnatory of the Administration's course with regard to certain 
Southern States. It was evident that the hearers present, with the exception 
of the negroes, were all of one mind, and would vote the Conservative ticket 
without fail. But as soon as the farmers had seen the candidate of their party 
for Governor, and heard him make a few remarks, many of them strolled back 
upon the lawn, and began discussing crops and comparing notes on horses. They 



WAYSIDE TYPES IN VIRGINIA. 



573 




Wayside Types— A Sketch from the Artist's Virginia Sketch-Book. 



574 



WHAT THE NEGROES THINK SCHOOLS. 



regarded the election of the Conservative ticket in the State as a foregone con- 
clusion, and were apparently tired of all political talk, preferring to attend to 
their home matters, and the bettering of their agricultural prospects, rather than 
to a revival of past memories. By noon many of them had completed their 
errands, and were riding out of town on their smart horses, as grimly and 
silently as they had entered. 

The negroes seemed to consider the Conservative triumph as certain ; and 
those who were intelligent were basing all hope of an improvement in their con- 
dition on the influences of time rather than on anything else. They hope to 
make education general among their race ; and, during the four years that the 
Conservatives will remain in power, they think that a more intelligent ground- 
work of politics may be formed. In the back counties it will be found difficult 




Wytheville, Virginia. 

to establish the free common school on a good and reliable basis ; but, certainly, 
both whites and blacks enjoy excellent school facilities in most of the larger 
towns. A careful canvass of the counties in South-western Virginia, and the 
Piedmont district, in 1872, shows that, while there was still some marked oppo- 
sition to the free public school, the sentiment of the mass was gradually be- 
coming favorable to it. 

There has never been, since the war, any inclination on the part of the whites 
to hinder the negro from getting as much education as he can himself pay for ; 
and, although some resistance to the collection of taxes for school purposes was 
anticipated at the time the system went into operation, in 1870, there never has 
been any worthy of the name. The negroes in many of the counties manifest 
more eagerness to enter school than do the whites, but they are not always willing 



WYTHEVILLE — MAX MEADOWS. 



575 



to pay something to support the school. On the whole, great progress has been 
made ; the Peabody fund has done, and still does good work in Bristol, Abingdon, 
Marion, Salem, Wytheville and Lynchburg ; the number of school edifices is 
increasing, and good teachers are more readily procured than at the outset. The 
mass of the people throughout that region, as in other parts of Virginia, would, I 
think, prefer that the Legislature should take the responsibility of raising the funds 




Max Meadows, Virginia. 

to support the schools. At present the supervisors and judges in each county 
have the power to regulate the local school taxes, and the result of this is that 
the school trustees, who are required by law to provide good school edifices for 
the pupils, have not the money with which to build them. But experience 
and improved sentiment are gradually regulating all these matters. 

Near Marion, and in the mountains back of the town, the deposits of iron 
ores promise to be very rich, and furnaces will soon be established there. Bary- 
tes has long been mined in the vicinity. In the adjoining county, at Wytheville, 
a pretty town lying on the western slope of a spur of the Alleghanies, 2,000 feet 
above tide-water, we saw fine specimens of coal, iron, lead and zinc ore, mined 
in the vicinity. The Austinville lead mines, near by, have been worked for more 
than a century. All the zinc is at present transported to the Eastern States 
before being smelted. 

A little more than six miles from Wytheville several extensive coal veins 
have been opened, and ample stores of limestone are found near these veins, so 
that furnaces and rolling-mills would get their material ready to hand, if erected 
at such an excellent point on the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio line as Wythe- 
ville. The water power in the vicinity is magnificent. Beyond lie Kent's Mill 
and Max Meadows, the latter a lovely pastoral landscape dotted with fine stock. 
To Max Meadows zinc and pig-iron are brought in large quantities from the 
country between the station and the North Carolina mountain frontier. In that 
section there are also extensive lead and shot works, and silver enough is scat- 
tered in the zinc-beds to pay the men mining the latter for their work. At 



576 



ALONG THE NEW RIVER. 



Dublin, a little village in the midst of fertile fields, there are large iron interests. 
This is a depot whence many shipments of the celebrated short-horn beef cattle 
aire made. As soon as the railway now prompting the growth of these interests 
can shoot out its feeders on either side, the number of tons of minerals annually 
exported from Virginia will be quadrupled. Not far from this point the owners 
of the Radford Iron Works of Philadelphia are shipping pig-iron from a newly- 
erected furnace. 

The banks of New river are so lovely in the autumn time, that we determined 
not to hasten by them in the express train; so we mounted upon a hand-car, 
which the strong arms of two stout negroes sent down grade at thirty, and up 
the toilsome ascents at five, miles an hour. The river, a few miles beyond Dub- 
lin, is broad and wonderfully clear, mirroring in its placid breast the verdure- 
bordered banks, and the rich foliage of the forests along the cliffs, to whose sides 
the railway confidingly clings. 




The Roanoke Valley, Virginia. [Page 577.] 

Traversing the stream, and mounting a little hill, we caught a view of "Bald 
Knob." The bare poll of the venerable mountain was touched by the afternoon 
sunlight as we looked, and the great height formed an admirable background to 
the richly broken landscape along the riverside. One may make a pleasant 
voyage on the New river from this point to Eggleston's Springs, twenty-five miles 
further down the current, taking one of the many bateaux which ply constantly 
on the stream, and simply drifting on the lazy wave until the destination is 
reached. Within easy distance of these springs one comes upon the greatest 
natural wonder of the Virginian mountains, — a pond or lake, having no visible 
source of supply, sunk in a kind of earth cup, on a height 4,500 feet above the 
level of the sea. It has been forming and enlarging for more than sixty years, 
and is now about three-quarters of a mile long by a third of a mile wide. Sub- 
merged trees can be seen beneath its pellucid surface ; and a line hundreds of 



CHRI STI ANSBURG — THE ROANOKE VALLEY. 



W 



feet long, if let down its middle waters, will not touch bottom. Higher up, in 
the same range, is the " Bald Knob," the view from whose summit is considered 
quite as grand as that from the Peak of Otter. 

A little beyond New river we stopped at a primitive coal station, where great 
heaps of the black diamonds, newly brought from "Brush" mountain, were lying. 
As I inquired the name of the mine from which they came, a by-stander 
answered, "The mountain is all coal, and every farmer is his own miner." 

At Christiansburg, which is in the spring region, we were not far from the site 
of the new State Agricultural and Mechanical College at Blacksburg. The 
"farm" attached to the college comprises two hundred and fifty acres, lying in 
the fertile " Valley of Virginia," and with veins of coal of superior quality, and 
large bodies of timber within easy reach. Climbing over the huge grades which 
dominate the Alleghanies at this point, and passing through the deep cuts in the 
rock-ribbed hills near the stations giving access to Montgomery White Sulphur 
and Alleghany Springs, we came suddenly upon the delicious expanse of the 
Roanoke valley, bathed in the splendid shimmer of an afternoon autumn sun, 
and fading into delicatest colored shadows where the mountains rose gently, as if 
loth to leave the lowly retreat. The vale was filled with wheat and corn fields, 
and with perfect meadows, through which ran little brooks gleaming in the sun. 

After crossing the Roanoke river we came into a region covered with fine 
fields of tobacco, which extended far up the hill-sides. Just below is the pleasant 
station of " Big Spring," to which we had been gradually descending for some 




View near Salem, Virginia. 

time on the high cliffs along the side of the Roanoke valley. At Big Spring a 
profusion of iron and copper ore has been found. Salem, the site of Roanoke 
College, is surrounded by charming hills, and stands in one of the richest agricul- 
tural regions in the United States. Near Salem are some lovely streams, 
bordered by rich foliage. Throughout the adjacent sections the farmers are very 



578 



SOUTH-WESTERN VIRGINIAS FUTURE, 



well-to-do, many owning from 1,200 to 1,300 acres of land, worth $80 to $90 
per acre. Tobacco and the cereals are grown there in large quantities. Salem 
and "Big Lick," just beyond, export immense quantities of cereals. Salem 
stands at the head of navigation on the Roanoke, and communicates with 
Weldon, in North Carolina. Here, too, it is hoped that a road, opening up the 
Shenandoah valley, will connect with the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio line. 

The wealth of this region is by no means developed yet. South-western 
Virginia proper, which remained so long unexplored after the valley and the 
Potomac shores had been carefully studied, has a grand future. As a field for 
immigrants who have capital and intelligence, for the better class of large farm- 
ers, and for workers in metal, it cannot be surpassed. An empire in itself, with 
every resource conceivable, it is not wonderful that that rare soldier, General 
Lee, boasted that he " could carry on the war for twenty years from those 
western mountains." 




View on the James River below Lynchburg. 



LXIV. 



PETERSBURG — A NEGRO REVIVAL MEETING. 

THE journey from Lynchburg to Petersburg calls up many memories. 
Eight years ago the mad rush of desperate and final battle swept across 
it. From the log and earth parapets of Five Forks, where Pickett's forces met 
their doom at the hands of Sheridan ; from the Appomattox and from Hatcher's 
Run ; from Fort Gregg, where the splendid Mississippians held on against hope 
and fate until nearly all of them had perished ; from the intrenchments of 
deserted Petersburg ; from Burkesville ; from the road to Jetersville, over which 
Sheridan and the "Fifth" went clattering; from Amelia Court-House and from 
Sailor's Creek ; from the High Bridge, and from Cumberland Church near Farm- 
ville, where Mahone made his heroic stand, and would not be driven ; from all 
the bloody and memorable fields which stretch, sunlit and peaceful now, from the 




Appomattox Court-House — "It lies silently half-hidden in its groves and gardens." [Page 580. 



hills around Petersburg to the village of Appomattox Court-House, come echoes 
which recall to us some faint impressions of the splendor and the grandeur of that 
last resistance of the broken army of Northern Virginia. 

Along the line of rail where now currents of trade flow stronger and more 
steadily than in the most prosperous days of the old regime, raged a gigantic 
struggle, the very traces of which seem to have passed away. Now and then the 
eye catches the outline of a grass-grown intrenchment, in the midst of some 
well-cultivated field ; but there are notably few marks of that wild series of 
battles by day and flights and pursuits by night which ended when Gordon, 
with the advance guard of Lee's exhausted army, had charged successfully 
against the cavalry ranged in front of him, only to find that behind that cavalry 
were the blue infantry lines which foretold the necessity of ^surrender. 



58O APPOMATTOX COURT-HOUSE. 

There is nothing especially interesting in Appomattox Court- House. The 
little village lies at a short distance from the railway station, around which idle 
negroes are always lounging. It lies silently half-hidden in its groves and gardens, 
as if frightened at the notoriety it has achieved. The house where Lee and Grant 
arranged the terms of surrender is pointed out to the Northern visitor ; but aside 
from its associations, it has nothing to recommend it to attention. The surround- 
ing country, however, is quite beautiful. Farmville, so memorable for the battles 
in its vicinity, seems alert and full of energy ; it has the stamp of a New England 
town in the vivacity of its streets, as I saw them. It has long been an important 
tobacco market, and the people are prosperous and progressive. Hampden- 
Sidney College is not many miles away ; and a short distance below the town is 
the famous " High Bridge," simply a railway viaduct, where General Mahone 
had proposed, in those terrible days of April, 1865, to make one of his stubborn 
fights, but whence he was forced to fall back to his position at " the church." 
The fields on which one looks down from this great bridge — a triumph of 
engineering — are beautifully cultivated in tobacco and corn. The valley was 
delicious in color, as I passed through it in an autumn sunlight. 

Below Burkesville the cotton-fields were numerous ; acres were white with 
the pretty shrub's blossoms, and the intrenchments of eight years ago were here 
and there covered with them. Seen from a distance, Petersburg presents the 
appearance of a lovely forest, pierced by church spires and towers. On entering 
it, one sees many signs of commercial prosperity. Along the railroad line in 
the suburbs are large cotton-mills, and the much beleaguered town now echoes 
to the whirr of spindles, and the ring of hammers on tobacco-hogsheads. 

The negroes were slightly in the majority in Petersburg at the time of my 
visit. As at Lynchburg, the Northerner is at first amazed by the mass of black 
and yellow faces. The hackmen who shriek in your ear as you arrive at the 
depot, the brakeman on the train, the waiter in the hotel, all are African. In the 
tobacco factories hundreds of dusky forms are toiling, and an equal number are 
slouching in the sunshine. On the day of my visit a colored Masonic excursion 
had arrived from Richmond, and the streets were filled with stout negro men, 
decently clothed, and their wives and sweethearts, attired in even louder colors 
than those affected by Northern servant girls. Each was talking vociferously ; 
officials, in flaunting regalia and sweating at every pore, rushed to and fro ; 
bands thundered and urchins screamed. The Virginia negro has almost the 
French passion for fete-days ; he is continually planning some excursion or 
" reunion," and will readily consent to live in a cellar and submit to poor fare 
for the sake of saving money to expend in frolic. 

At Petersburg the negroes are from time to time largely represented in the 
Common Council, and sometimes have a controlling voice in municipal affairs. 
The white citizens have readily adapted themselves to circumstances, and the 
session of the Council which I attended was as orderly and, in the main, as well 
conducted as that of any Eastern city. There was, it is true, an informality in 
the speech of some of the colored members which was ludicrous, but it was 
evident that all were acting intelligently, and had come to some appreciation of 



PETERSBURG ITS SCHOOLS, 



5 8l 



their responsibilities. Most of the colored members were full types of the 
African. In some matters they readily admit the superiority of the white man in 
legislation, and in Petersburg willingly gave the management of the city finances 
into the hands of the elder Conservative members of the Council. The Commis- 
sioner of Streets and the Engineer of the Board of Waterworks were both 
negroes. The mayoralty and the other city offices remained, at the epoch of my 
visit, in the hands of white Radicals, and the negroes had made no special 
struggle to secure them, although they are to the whites in the city as eleven to 




"The hackmen who shriek in your ear as you arrive at the depot." [ Page 580.] 

nine. The Conservatives allege that they are unable to compete with the 
negroes in tricks at election-time. They say, among other things, that they 
have never been able to secure burial records of the negro population, since it is 
their custom to make a dead voter renew his life in the person of one of his 
friends. 

The Petersburg schools are noteworthy examples of Virginian progress since 
the war, and merit the warmest encomiums. No attempt has been made by 
black or white to insist upon the education of the races together, it being tacitly 
allowed on both sides that it would not be wise. Petersburg's general free sys- 
tem of public schools was founded in 1868, when $2,000 of the " Peabody 



582 THE INDUSTRIES OF PETERSBURG. 

Fund " was contributed, on condition that the city should raise $20,000, and 
with it establish schools for all classes and colors. By the second year nearly 
3,000 pupils were enrolled, and both whites and blacks are now given all facili- 
ties for a thorough education. The colored young men have not, as a mass. 



.... ."■..■.,. 

■■■-....;-.■■ - ■:■■.■■.-■■■.■■.:--. 




"The 'Crater,' the chasm created by the explosion of the mine which the Pennsylvanians 
sprung underneath Lee's fortifications." 

made any special demand for instruction in the higher branches ; their main 
desire is for a knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, and such general study as 
will enable them to speak in public or to preach ; but the girls in many of the negro 
schools are capable of mastering Caesar, and can write correct French exercises. 

About 5,000 negroes are at work in the tobacco warehouses; in the cotton- 
mills white labor exclusively is employed. Eight of these mills are established 
in and near the city, viz. : the Mattoaca, Ettricks, Battersea, Davis, Roper & 
Co's, Swift Creek, Kevan, and Lynch. Two thousand operatives are employed 
in manufacturing cotton. Numbers of Scotchmen have settled in the vicinity, 
and some of them are largely interested in the mills. Petersburg's annual 
receipts of cotton and tobacco are very large. During the last year 42,500 
bales of cotton and 14,000 hogsheads of tobacco were received. The flouring- 
mills of the city have a capacity of 1,000 barrels daily. This thriving com- 
munity of 18,000 persons has shrewdly thrust itself between Richmond and the 
northern counties of North Carolina, and has thus secured a large portion of the 
trade which the capital considered its own. Petersburg supplies the planters 
and farmers of the adjacent State with bacon and corn, and in return takes 
tobacco and cotton. The Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio railroad opens up to it 
long stretches of fertile country. 

The town contains many charming avenues, bordered with elegant mansions 
embowered in foliage ; some of the business streets are quaint and almost foreign 
in aspect. The Appomattox makes here and there a picturesque waterfall ; the 
hill on which the old cemetery and ruined, ivy-mantled Blandford Church stand 
commands a lovely view of the city, around which, in every direction, miles on 
miles, stretch the decaying intrenchments, batteries, and forts of the great siege. 
The lines along the eastern and southern suburbs are still pretty clearly denned ; 
but the traces of the battles have nearly all vanished. The " Crater," the chasm 



MEMORIALS OF THE WAR. 



583 



created by the explosion of the mine which the Pennsylvanians sprung under- 
neath Lee's fortifications, on that dread day of the unsuccessful assault in July, 
1864, is overgrown with shrubbery; and the farmer, who points out the old lines of 
the two armies, says that he himself can hardly realize that his farm was once a 
mighty fortified camp. Along what was known as the " new intrenched line," 
constructed after the explosion and the consequent battle, — and around the worn 
earthworks of Forts "Hell" and "Damnation,"* — some marks of strife are yet 
noticeable. The National cemetery, with its 3,000 graves, near the "Poplar 
Spring Church," and the lot on Cemetery Hill, devoted to " Our Soldiers," where 
sleep the Confederate dead ; the little church which a regiment of New York 
engineers erected during the weary months of the siege, and (when they left for 
Five Forks) presented to their enemies; the "Signal Tower," built by the same 
hands ; and, scattered in the vales and along the slopes, some vaguely-defined 
ruins of rifle-pit and subterranean passage, of bomb-proof and sharpshooter's 
lurking-hole, are all that remain as memorials of the fierce and deadly struggle 
which lasted ten months, and cost many thousands of lives. 

During our stay in this section a "revival meeting" was announced by the 
colored brethren of the surrounding country, to be held at a little station half-way 
between Richmond and Petersburg, and we determined to be present. On a 
beautiful Sunday morn- 
ing we drove out through 
the fields, in which, the 
oak timber having been 
cut away, a rank growth 
of pine had sprung up ; 
and stopping a massive 
coal black man, dressed 
in white duck, with a 
flaming red necktie at 
his throat, we inquired 
"the way." 

"Ef yo' want to go 
to Zion's Hill, dat yer 's 
de way ; but ef yo' want 
to go whar de good 
preachin' is, dis yer road 
'11 take yo' to it." 

Presently we arrived 
at a large frame build- 
ing, much like a country 
school -house, save that 
it was neither ceiled nor plastered, and therein the revivalists were gathered. 
A powerful spiritual wave had swept over the colored population, and dozens 
of carts, loaded with dusky searchers for truth, came rolling along the rough 
* Sobriquets given Forts Sedgwick and Mahone. 




The old cemetery, and ruined, ivy -mantled Blandford Church." [Page 582.] 



5§4 



A NEGRO SERMON. 



roads, and stopped before the primitive door. Entering, we found represented 
every shade of color, from the coal black full-blood to the elegantly dressed 
and well-mannered octoroon. The congregation was not large. Owing to 
the excitement which had prevailed for several previous Sabbaths, many had 
retired, worn out, from the spiritual feast. The women sat on the left side, the 
men on the right of a broad aisle, running to a plain wooden pulpit, in which 
were three moon-faced negroes, two of them preachers, and the third a State 

Senator. 

In front of the pulpit, behind a little table, stood an olive-colored elderly 
man, neatly dressed, and with a wildness in his eyes, and an intensity written 
upon his lips which reminded me of what I had read of the " Convulsionists of 
St. Medard." The audience was breathless with attention as the preacher, a 
strolling missionary, supported by Quakers in Louisiana, took up the great Bible, 
and, poising it on his lean, nervous hand, poured forth such an impassioned 
appeal that I fairly trembled. I was not prepared for such vehemence. Never, 
in the history of New England revivalism, was there such a scene. The preacher 
stood with many of his hearers well around him; one of the deacons and 
exhorters, a black giant in spectacles, was his point d'appui, and to him he 
appealed from time to time, shaking him roughly by the shoulder, and hissing 
his words in his ear with fiery vehemence. The proposition with which he 
started was somewhat incomprehensible to us, viz. : " Christ is the creating power 
of God ;" but the proposition was of no consequence, because every few moments 
he would burst into paroxysms of exhortation, before which the emotional 
audience rocked and trembled like reeds in a wind. He had a peculiar way of 
addressing himself suddenly and in a startling manner to some individual in the 
congregation, dancing, and pounding the table furiously with both hands, in the 
agony of his exhortation to that person. 

From time to time he would draw in his breath with great force, as if repress- 
ing a sob, and, when speaking of love and salvation, he inevitably fell into a 
chant, or monotone, which was very effective. Under the hurricanes of his 
appeal, the fury of. his shouting, the magnetic influence of his song, one of the 
old deacons went into a spasm of religious fervor, and now and then yelled vocif- 
erously. A milder brother ventured to remonstrate, whereupon the Quaker 
preacher turned upon him, saying loudly : 

" Let dat brudder shout, an' 'tend to dine own business !" 
Then he began preaching against hypocrisy. He seemed especially to chide 
the women for becoming converted with too great ease. " Woe !" he cried, "woe 
unto dat woman what goes down into the water befo' she ready ; woe unto her !" 
with a long, singing descent on the last words ; and then he added, sotto voce, 
" Dat what make so many women come up stranglin' an' vomitin' an' pukin' outen 
de water ; de debbil dat still in 'em git hole on 'em, an' shake 'em an' choke 'em 
under de water! Let no woman shout for Jesus what don't know 'bout Jesus! 
It 's one thing to git to Heaven, but it 's anudder to git in ! Don' ye know what 
Heaven is ? Heaven 's God ! We must know what we is preachin' about, an' ef 
we don't we ought to SET down!" (This with terrific emphasis.) 



"DIE RIGHT, BR UDDER," — FATHER JUPITER. 



585 



In describing the creation, he said: " Breddren, it 's now 12,877 years sence 
de good Lord made de world, an' de morning stars sung togedder. Dat wa'n't 
yesterday! Ha! read de Book o' Job, 'n see for yerself! Dat zvdn't a month 
ago! I was ut dar den!" (thus illustrating with sublime scorn the littleness of 
man), " but by de grace of God, I '11 git dar by 'n' by !" (here his voice was faint 
and suggestive of tearful joy) "to join de mornin' stars, an' we '11 all sing togedder! 

" Oh, yes ! oh, yes ! Heaven's God made de world an' de fullness darof, an' 
hung it up on de high hooks of heaven. Dar wa'n't no nails dar ; no hammer 
dar; no nothin' but de word of God." In hinting at the terrors of death to the 
unconverted, he sang wild word-pictures which had a certain rude force even for us, 
and then shrieked out these sentences : " Ef de brudders don't want to die in de 
dark, dey must git Christ to hole de candle. God's grace shall be de candle in de 
good brudder's heart. Devils may howl, lions may roar, but nothin' shall daunt 
dat brudder's heart. Angels shall come down with lighted candles in deir hands 
to congratulate de brudder." Then, once more screaming and dancing and weep- 



. . . . lg 

:■ :--~*£?-^: . — - "iTffitMMTMBfW 







" Seen from a distance, Petersburg presents the appearance of a lovely forest pierced here 
and there by church spires and towers." [Page 580.] 

ing, he uttered these words : " Die right, brudder, 'n' yo' shall not die in de 
night ; yo' shall die in eternal day. Ef Christ don't bring light enough, den God 
will come wid his candle ; an* ef dat ain't enough, den de Holy Ghost '11 come 
wid his candle, too, an' dar can't be no more night wid dat brudder's soul." 

At another period in the sermon, he said : " Ef we can't preach God, we can 
exhort Him ; ef we can't exhort Him, we can live Him ; an' ef we can't live 
Him, we can die Him. I 've served under Him forty-two long year — longer dan 
Moses led Israel in de wilderness ; an' ef I don' know what God is, den I 'd 
better shut up an' go home ! ! ! Jesus snatched my soul from hell forty-two year 
ago in Fredericksburg, in old Vaginny ! Praise Him ! O praise Him ! Let no 
brudder shout for Jesus who don' know Jesus." 

After the more furious passages of exhortation were over, he gave his ideas 
upon prayer, something in this wise : " Dar was ole Fadder Jupiter (a colored 
preacher). Now Jupiter he used to git a Bible in one han' an' a pra'r-book in 
anudder, an' a hymn-book under his arm ; an' den he 'd start out to see de wid- 
ders 'n' de fadderless; 'n' one day I met old Fadder Jupiter, 'n' I say to him: 
\ Fadder Jupiter, how many pounds of meat have yo' prayed ? How many 



586 A MODEL PRAYER-BOOK SCENE AT THE ALTAR. 

pounds of sugar have yo' exhorted ? How many cups of coffee have yo' sung to 
dem pore widders 'n' fadderless ?' 'N' he says: ' Not one.' 'N' den I say : "Pears 
like, Fadder Jupiter, yo '11 sing here, and pray dar, 'n' yo '11 pray every widder to 
death 'n' sing every fadderless child to de grave; 'n' call in help to bury 'em.' 'N' 
den I told him dat when he sung he must call a bar'l o' flour long metre, 'n' fur short 
metre he must take a keg of lard, 'n' dat 's short enough, anyhow ; and fur par- 
ticler metre nice ham 'n' some coffee; 'n' den he mus' take de Quaker pra'r-book, 
a two- wheeled cart, 'n' fill up de ole pra'r-book with coal ; 'n' when de col' wed- 
der come he must drive de ole pra'r-book down to some widder sister's, V say : 
' Sister, I 've come to pray six bushels of coal with yo', 'n' den open de cellar door, 
dump de ole pra'r-book, 'n' pray de cellar full o' coal.'" 

The sermon was interspersed with impassioned recitations from Watts and 
Wesley. There was no logic, and no clear idea of anything except the love of 
God and charity. Now and then, with pompous air, the speaker would say : "An' 
now, breddren, we will proceed to consider de third (or fourth or fifth) point," and 
after a moment of solemn cogitation, would plunge into exhortation, appeal, and 
sarcasm, and yell untiHhe rafters rang. His face was convulsed, and sobs shook 
his whole frame when he sat down. A strange wild hymn was sung, the singers 
waving their bodies to and fro to the measure of the music. 

One of the ministers then arose, and bade those who desired the prayers of 
the church to come forward and lay their sins upon the altar. An indescribable 
rush of some twenty persons ensued. Old men and young girls hastened 
together to the pulpit, and knelt with their faces bowed upon their hands, and a 
low tremulous prayer to "■ O my Heavenly Fadder," was heard, as one of the 
old deacons poured forth his soul in supplication. During the prayer an 
exhorter passed around among the congregation, singling out the impenitent, 
and personally addressing them : " Yo' better go now !" " How '11 yo' feel when 
it's too late, 'n' dar ain't no gittin dar?" In a short time the church resounded 
to groans and prayers, high over all of which was heard the clear voice of 
the colored Quaker chanting : 



"For everywhar I went to pray 
I met all hell right on my way,' 



"but Heaven's God, 'n' we '11 get dar by 'n' by. O praise Him! O bless Him, 
'n' sing 'wid de mornin' stars !" 

Some of the colored preachers, although they make extravagant pretensions, 
are by no means so moral as our " Fadder Quaker," and, exercising absolute 
spiritual control over their ignorant flocks, prompt them to unworthy deeds, and 
fill their minds with wrong ideas. There is also a multitude of quacks and false 
prophets who seek to make money out of a revival of the barbaric superstitions 
still prevalent among certain classes of negroes. 

On one occasion a huge negro created quite a clamor among the blacks in 
Petersburg, by announcing that he could cure any one afflicted with disease. He 
practically revived many of the features of Voudouism, and was rapidly fleecing 
his victims, when a pitying white man interposed and tried to expose the swindler. 



NEGRO WITCHCRAFT. 5^7 

But it was of no avail. The quack boldly challenged the would-be exposer to 
witness a cure of a long standing case of dropsy. At the house of the sick 
man the incredulous Caucasian found a large crowd of faithful believers assembled 
in front of a circle of bones, old rags, and other trash, over which the quack was 
muttering some gibberish. Finally the announcement was made that there was 
something in the sick man's bed which had made him ill ; and, after a little 
search, a mysterious packet was found beneath the mattress. 

While the horror-stricken crowd were bewailing this evidence of witchcraft, 
the white man insisted on opening the packet, found it filled with harmless herbs 
and minerals, and endeavored to convince the negroes that the doctor's confed- 
erate had undoubtedly concealed it there. But they would not believe him, and 
insisted on considering the doctor great at divination, although their confidence 
was a little shaken when the man stricken with dropsy died, despite the discovery 
and removal of the hurtful charm. 




A Queer Cavalier. 



38 



LXV. 



THE DISMAL SWAMP — NORFOLK — THE COAST. 

CITY POINT, the historic peninsula upon the winding James river, is 
connected with Petersburg by a branch of the Atlantic, Mississippi 
and Ohio railroad, and steamers come up from the coast to carry away coal 
and iron. The route from Petersburg to Norfolk lies through Prince George, 
Sussex, Southampton, Isle of Wight, Nansemond and Norfolk counties. General 
Mahone's splendidly-constructed railway runs in a perfect air line for at least 
seventy-five of the eighty-one miles between the two cities, and is in all respects 
a model highway to so important a port as Norfolk. It takes the traveler 





City Point, Virginia. 

through fine cotton -fields; then along 
stretches of plain covered with thin 
swaying pines ; now through clearings 
where rows of cabins are erected, and stalwart negroes are hewing wood and 
digging drains ; now into thickets through which rough roads lead to some 
remote plantation ; now through smart little villages, until at last he reaches 
Suffolk, the pretty shire town of Nansemond county. Suffolk is energetic, and 
well supplied with railways and river navigation ; manufactories are springing 
up; the Sea-board and Roanoke railway touches there; the county has about 
11,000 inhabitants, most of whom are prosperous. The climate in that section 
is usually delightful; the thermometer ranges from 22 degrees in winter to 94 
degrees in summer, with seasons long enough for the maturity of all crops ; 
and, indeed, the same land often produces two crops in one season. Cotton 
and all the cereals yield immensely. Many Northern people and a large number 
of English families have settled in the vicinity. 



THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP. 



589 



•In Norfolk county we entered the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, which 
extends far downward over some of the northern portions of North Carolina, and 
is intersected by canals, on which there is quite an extensive transportation busi- 
ness. The "swamp" is a succession of wild and, apparently, irreclaimable 
marshes, through which run ___^ 

black currents of water, and in 
the midst of which spring up 
thousands of dead tree-trunks. 
Many of these trunks are char- 
red or blackened by the prog- 
ress of some recent fire. Some 
are fantastically shaped, and 
have been imagined to bear 
resemblance to well-known 
statues. The passer-by has his 
attention invited to the "Column 
Vendome." 

For miles the eye encounters 
nothing save the bewildering 
stretch of swamp and dead trees, 
or the dreary country covered 
with rank growth of pines and 
underbrush. The only signs of 
life are occasional groups of 
negroes about some saw-mill, on 
a "hummock," or a glimpse of 
dusky forms on a barge float- 
ing along one of the Stygian 
canals, as the train glides 
smoothly and swiftly by. Drummond's Lake, penetrated by a feeder from 
the " Dismal Swamp " canal, is about thirty miles long. 

Norfolk has a real English aspect. It is like some of the venerable towns 
along the southern coast of England, and the illusion to which the traveler 
readily yields is heightened by the appearance of many English names on the 
street corners, over the doors of some business houses, and at almost every turn. 
The grand current of the Elizabeth (opposite Fort Norfolk) is so broad and deep 
that the largest ship that floats can swing around there. Midstream, there is 
much clatter and activity ; ships and steamers arrive and depart, and the hoarse 
shout of the sailor is heard all day long, vying in strength with the scream of 
the steamboat whistle. In the streets remote from the water-side, not so much 
activity is apparent, but there are long rows of staid, comfortable-looking houses, 
embowered in trees, many fine churches, and an ambitious custom-house. The 
trains of the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio railroad discharge their freights of 
cotton and grain directly upon wharves at the steamers' sides, and the unusual 
facilities are yearly increased and improved. 




A Peep into the Great Dismal Swamp. 



590 Norfolk's importance as a port. 

The people of Norfolk are beginning to understand the consolidation policy 
in railroad matters now-a-days. Time was when they could hardly perceive 
the advantages of a road laid through the treacherous "hummocks" of the 
Dismal Swamp, and they called the iron bridge over the Elizabeth " Mahone's 
Folly " when it was first built, thinking that it would cripple the line. But now 
that they have grappled hold of the commerce of the West, and have begun to 
compare their advantages with those of New York, they cannot enough praise 
the sagacity of those who labored until the great through line was an accom- 
plished fact. 

The importance of Norfolk as a port of the future is certainly indisputable ; 
and it is not at all improbable that within a few years it will have direct com- 
munication with European ports, by means of ocean steamers, owned and 
controlled in this country. The Norfolk people have made an effort to turn the 
European emigration, bound to Texas., through their town, forwarding it over the 
lines penetrating South-western Virginia and Tennessee. But, thus far, only a 
fortnightly steamer of the Allan Line has touched at Norfolk, bringing, usually, 
many English families for the lands around Charlottesville and Gordonsville. 
The Elizabeth river is not so lively now as when, at the beginning of this 
century, the river could not be seen, so thick was the shipping between the 
Norfolk and Portsmouth shores. In the financial crash which came at that 
time, sixty Norfolk firms interested in maritime commerce failed ; the modern 
town does not boast as many. 

Norfolk* lies within thirty-two miles of the Atlantic. Northward stretch 
the Chesapeake and its tributaries, navigable nearly a thousand miles ; west- 
ward is the James, giving communication with Richmond, and five hundred 
miles of water- way ; southward run the canals to Currituck, Albemarle and 
Pamlico, communicating with two thousand miles of river- channel. She affords 

* The eastern and southern branches of the Elizabeth river are superior in depth to the 
Thames at London, or the Mersey at Liverpool. The depth of water in the harbor at Norfolk 
is twenty-eight feet, or nearly twice that regularly maintained at New Orleans ; and the harbor 
is spacious enough to admit the commercial marine of the whole country. It has been estimated 
that thirty miles of excellent water-front for wharfage can readily be afforded. 

Eastern North Carolina is the natural ally of Norfolk in commerce. Behind the barrier of. 
sand-hills, extending along the Carolina coast, lies one of the most fertile regions on the conti- 
nent, which can find no more convenient outlet than Norfolk. The Sea-board and Roanoke 
railroad penetrates North Carolina, a little above the point at which the trade becomes tributary 
to its canals, and connects with the Raleigh and Gaston, and Wilmington and Weldon railroads, 
at Weldon. The Norfolk and Great Western road is a projected route to run through the southern 
counties of Virginia, touching at Danville and terminating at Bristol. The natural seaport of 
the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad, which, coming from the Ohio river, penetrates the mountains 
of Western Virginia, is, of course, Norfolk. The Albemarle and Chesapeake canal, through 
which, during eleven years from the 30th of September, i860, more than thirty- five thousand 
vessels of all classes passed, penetrates a country rich in cereals, woods, and naval stores, all of 
which it brings directly to Norfolk. The river lines of steamers, running to Yorktown, Hampton, 
and Old Point, Elizabeth City, and Washington, N. C, Roanoke Island, and other places, are 
rapidly re-establishing the local trade of the Chesapeake and its tributaries, interrupted by the 
war. The receipts of cotton at Norfolk in 1858 were 6,174 bales; we have seen that in 1872 
they were more than 400,000. 



NORFOLK S CARRYING TRADE. 



S9i 





TPI 




naturally the best seaport for most of 
North Carolina and Tennessee, besides 
large sections of Northern Georgia, 
Alabama, Mississippi, and the South- 
west. A thorough system of internal 
improvements in Virginia, giving lines 
leading from tide -water in that State to 
the North-west, would enable Norfolk 
almost to usurp the commercial pre- 
eminence of New York. Pittsburg, and 
Wheeling, and Toledo are geographically 
nearer the Capes of Virginia than to 
Sandy Hook; and it is almost certain 
that in the future many of the highways 
to the sea from the West will run through 
Virginia, and the ports furnishing outlets 
to the Western cities will be along the 
beautiful and capacious Chesapeake bay. 
Ingenious minds have already mapped an 
■| ocean route from Norfolk to the Holland 
jS coast — one possessing great advantages — 
£ and it is to be hoped that a corn- 
's pany may be formed to place steamers 
"s upon it. 

o. There are good steamship lines be- 

§ tween Norfolk and New York, Boston, 
^ Baltimore, 'and Philadelphia. The Bos- 
ton steamers carry a great deal of cotton 
to the New England factories. Norfolk 
received in 1873 four hundred and six 
thousand bales of cotton, an enormous 
increase over her receipts in 1872. The 
amount brought by the Atlantic; Missis- 
sippi and Ohio railroad alone in 1873 was 
158,000 bales. The produce business of 
the port is very great ; during the active 
season a daily steamer is sent to New 
York, Boston, and Baltimore, and three 
weekly to Philadelphia. The "truck 
farms" — i. e., the market gardens in the 
vicinity, — give the shippers business at 
a time when "all cotton" towns are 
afflicted with dullness. The receipts of 
truck for 1872 amounted to $3,500,000; 
and the value of all the receipts was 



592 A PROMENADE ALONG ELIZABETH RIVER. 

$21,000,000.* The duties on imports into the district of Norfolk and Ports- 
mouth, from 1866 to 1 87 1 inclusive, amounted to more than $800,000. 

There is a large negro population in Norfolk, and the white citizens make 
•great struggles at each election to keep the municipal power in their own hands. 
They have long had excellent free schools, on which they are now expending 
$10,000 yearly; their city affairs are in good condition. The estimated real 
value of assessable property in the city is $17,000,000, and the greater part of 
the tax thereon is readily collected ; the citizens have built fine water- works at a 
large expense ; the shops are excellent ; society is exceedingly frank, cordial and 
refined. 

This goodly ancient town, with its 20,000 inhabitants, was laid out more than 
a century and a-half ago, but the British burned it in the Revolution, and it had 
to grow again. It has seen troublous times since then. The yellow fever has 
made one or two ghastly visitations, and war has disturbed the even tenor of its 
way. There came a day, too, when Portsmouth, the pleasant town just across 
the Elizabeth from Norfolk, and where one of the principal naval depots of the 
United States is situated, seemed enveloped in flame, and when the new-made 
Confederate on one side of the stream watched with mingled regret and exulta- 
tion the burning of the vast ship-houses and the ships-of-war which the United 
States were unwilling to allow him to capture. 

A promenade along the Elizabeth, in company with an ex- Confederate 
officer, was fruitful of souvenirs. It was toward sunset of a September day 
when we clambered upon the parapet of old Fort Norfolk, and gazed out over 
the broad expanse of sparkling water toward the .horizon, delicately bordered 
with foliage, which masked the embouchure of the James, and the black spots 
further down, indicating Crany Island and the entrance to Hampton Roads, where 
those two sea-devils, the "Merrimac" and the "Monitor," had their fierce battle. 
Fort Norfolk is now, as it was when the Confederates seized it, a magazine. The 
powder captured there at the beginning of the war long defended many a 
Southern town. 

From the quaint walls of the venerable fort we saw pretty villages and villas, 
and the noble United States Marine Hospital, on the opposite shore; could watch 
the schooners coming in with the tide, as the sunset deepened from blood- red 
until it mingled its last gleam with the strange neutral twilight; the sudden 
advent of a Baltimore steamer looming up like a spectre, with its dark sides and 
black wheels half-shrouded in smoke ; could see the rows of mansions extending 

* Some idea of the produce business may be had from the following enumeration of the 
articles which passed through Norfolk, bound mainly to Northern cities, in 1872, and the 
various articles received at the port. The receipts of corn were 1,628,940 bushels; of peanuts, 
544,025 bushels; of dried fruit, 346,542; oats, 329,110; peas, 152,420; wheat, 75,210; flour, 
100,640 barrels; rosin, 129,586 barrels; turpentine, 14,940 barrels ; pitch, 3,240 barrels; tobacco, 
3,525 hogsheads, 2,520 tierces, 34,270 cases, and 38,920 boxes. In the same time, 1,000,000 
dozens of eggs; 14,280,170 pounds of rags; $175,000 worth of shad; 6,000,000 bushels of 
oysters, amounting to nearly $4,000,000; 37,775 barrels of salt fish; 8,381,860 staves, 53,392,221 
shingles, and 57,496,290 feet of lumber were also received. The Sea-board and Roanoke rail- 
road annually brings in more than 180,000 bales of cotton. 



STROLLING ABOUT NORFOLK. 



593 



out to the very water's edge, and the piers jutting from their front doors, with 
rustic arbors and awnings, where one might sit and woo the fresh sea-breeze; 
could see the gracefully tapering masts, and the massive walls of the warehouses, 
and could hear the rattling of the chains, and singing of sailors. 

Strolling back, we noted the barelegged negro boys sculling in the skiffs 
which they had half-filled with oysters, and passed through streets entirely devoted 
to the establishments where the bivalve, torn from his shell, was packed in cans 
and stored to await his journey to the far West. Driving on the hard shell road, 
later in the evening, we passed long trains of fish-carts, in each of which lay a 




Map of the Virginia Peninsula. 

sleepy negro, growling if we asked one- half of the road ; saw the fields where, 
during the civil war, the Confederates had prepared to defend Norfolk from ap- 
proach of the blue-coated soldiery by land— —fields occupied by carefully-tilled 
farms, near which were the cabin and garden patch of the freedman; saw evidences 
on every hand of growth and progress, and found it hard, indeed, to convince 
ourselves that half a century had not passed since the "war for the Union" 
closed. 

The map given above shows the configuration of the Virginia peninsula, and 
the location of Hampton Roads, one of the most superb expanses of land-locked 
water in the world. This grand refuge, in which all the navies of the world 
might at one time find shelter from storm, is but fifteen miles from Norfolk. 
Entering from the Atlantic, between the two capes of Virginia, Charles and 



594 



HAMPTON ROADS. 



Henry, the ships of Newport, Smith, and Gosnold, the daring English explorers 
and colonists, penetrated more than two and a-half centuries ago to Hampton 
Roads and anchored opposite the point now known as Newport News. North- 
ward from Old Point Comfort, stretches the mighty Chesapeake bay, along whose 
richly-indented shores are some of the finest harbors on the American coast. 




Hampton Roads. 

Hampton Roads and Lynnhorn bay, lying between the capes, and under their 
shelter, are sometimes called the "Spit Head" and the "Downs" of the United 
States. The York, the Potomac, the Rappahannock and the James rivers empty 
their ample currents into the Chesapeake bay, which the Virginians claim as 
"Virginia water," because it passes through her borders to the sea, and flows to 
it between the capes. 

The "northern neck" of Virginia is that portion of her territory situated 
between the Rappahannock and the James rivers, and extending- from the Chesa- 
peake bay to the Blue Ridge mountains. The four counties in this section, Lan- 
caster, Northumberland, Richmond and Westmoreland, contain four hundred 
and sixty-six thousand acres, on which only 26,000 people are settled. Along 
the rivers and the bay there are beautiful plains, which run back some two 
miles to a ridge two hundred feet higher than the shores. This ridge extends 
throughout the length of the neck, and is intersected every few miles by streams 
of soft, fresh water. Many of these streams are navigable, and producers settled 
along their banks can have easy water communication with the principal Northern 
ports. The prodigal abundance of food to be had with very little effort, has thus 
far been an effectual hindrance to the proper development of this favored region; 
the negroes, who constitute a good part of the population, spend a few hours 



THE NECK THE TIDE-WATER REGION. 595 

of each day in securing the fish, oysters, and wild fowl with which the inlets 
abound, but do not possess sufficient ambition to become either fruit- raisers, 
market gardeners or oystermen. If they would work they might be prosperous; 
but they prefer a life of idleness. 

The soil of the Neck along the rivers is mainly composed of alluvial deposits. 
It was for years cultivated recklessly, and very seriously exhausted, under the 
regime of the slave-holder; yet to-day, without thorough culture, produces 
paying crops. The climate is delightful ; the winters are very short and by 
no means severe. Almost all varieties of fruit, save those peculiar to the tropics, 
can be cultivated to perfection there. Labor is cheap ; the negro is, of course, 
the only workman, and does as well as his limited knowledge and indolent dis- 
position will allow. He needs the example of ambitious immigrants to encourage 
him to a right development of the excellent resources so lavishly scattered 
around him. The white inhabitants eagerly welcome skilled workers, and offer 
them lands on favorable terms. 

The tide-water region of Virginia extends from the coast to an imaginary 
line drawn across the State, and touching at Fredericksburg, Richmond, and 
Petersburg. It includes the northern neck just described, and consists of a series 
of peninsulas whose sides are washed by the Chesapeake bay, and the great 
tidal rivers emptying into it. Throughout this section the principal item of land 
culture is market gardening; good farms are to be had for small prices. The 
lands are well drained ; reasonably free from marsh, with a soil of clay, marl 
and sand, and an overgrowth of pine and oak. It is estimated that 30,000,000 
bushels of oysters are annually drawn from the waters in this region ; a State 
tax is collected yearly on 20,000,000 bushels. Malarial fevers are the draw- 
back, and historical memorials are the boast of the section. Fevers prevail 
only during the autumn months, and will doubtless disappear entirely as the 
country becomes more densely populated, and sufficient attention is given to 
drainage. They are at present the curse of the river-side populations, and nothing 
is more common than to meet a lean, discolored individual who explains his woe- 
begone look by announcing that he has just had a " right smart shake." 



LXVI. 

THE EDUCATION OF NEGROES — THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY 
ASSOCIATION — THE PEABODY FUND — THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL. 

AT Hampton one begins to appreciate the magnitude of the revolution 
which has overtaken the South. There it was that, more than two 
hundred and fifty years ago, the first cargo of slaves was landed on American 
soil. There the curse began, and there its bitter leaven worked until the time of 
deliverance arrived, and it was ordained that, on the very ground where the negro 
had first been enslaved by the white man in Virginia, efforts for his elevation to 
a true manhood should be undertaken. 

Everywhere that the Union armies went in the South, they found the negro 
anxious for knowledge. The wretched slave was like a blind man who heard 
around him tumult and struggle, and who constantly cried aloud for light, for 
the power of vision. He was weighted down with the crushing burden of his 
past life ; he saw the great chance slipping away from him, and in his intense 
desire to become intelligent and independent, he fairly laid hold upon the soldiery 
for help. But the officers and men of the army knew not what to do with the 
negroes who took refuge -in the Union camps. Sometimes they sent them back 
to their masters ; at others they protected and fed them, while at the same time 
denying any intention of interfering with the institution of slavery. 

But the day came when General Butler pronounced the freedmen who, by 
thousands, had flocked into the country around Fortress Monroe, " contraband of 
war." Hungry, homeless, and filled with nameless dread, these rude exiles from 
the plantations of their late masters turned toward the National Government, 
and held out their hands for protection. They knew not what to do. The 
future lay dark before them. The cannon still thundered throughout Virginia. 
The negroes stood on the threshold of liberty, still fearing that they might be 
dragged away to their old condition of servitude. The country came to their 
aid. The National Government found the key-note of the situation in Butler's 
sharp, coarse proclamation, and held the negro refugees under its protection. 
Then the American Missionary Association came to the front. 

This noble Association, for so many years before the war an earnest worker 
in the antislavery cause, was ready and anxious to send material relief to the 
negroes. It was willing to aid in feeding their bodies as well as their souls. It 
had had its missionaries in all parts of the South, undergoing persecution and 
abuse for the sake of preaching the gospel and telling the truth. Its envoys had 
been driven out of some of the States ; others, as the outbreak of the war 
approached, were arrested and imprisoned. But the work went on ! 



ASSOCIATIONS FOR TEACHING FREEDMEN. 597 

In August of 1 86 1, Lewis Tappan, Esq., then Treasurer of the American 
Missionary Association, wrote to General Butler, at Fortress Monroe, asking 
what could be done to aid the negroes. The General answered, showing the 
unhappy condition of the freedmen and women, and welcoming any assistance. 
Letters came from soldiers and officers in the army to the charitable throughout 
New York and the East, asking help for the negroes. Rev. L. C. Lockwood was 
sent out to investigate the condition of the great mass of refugees in Virginia, 
and in September he opened a Sabbath school in the deserted mansion of ex- 
President Tyler. On the 17th day of the same month, he started the first day 
school for the freedmen. It was held in an humble house not far from Fortress 
Monroe, and was taught by Mary A. Peake, an excellent woman, whose father 
was an Englishman of rank and culture, but whose mother was a free colored 
woman.' She, the representative of both the oppressing and oppressed races, 
began her work of regeneration of the blacks on the very coast where the 
degradation began, and near a proud seminary where the daughters of Southern 
aristocrats had received the education paid for by the unrequited labor of slaves. 

As the war progressed, the work of teaching grew and strengthened among 
the freedmen. The Union forces made their way on to the sea-islands along the 
South Carolina coast in November of 1861, and the usual swarms of ignorant 
and half-starved negroes flocked around them. The envoys sent from the North 
to examine into the condition of these wretched people gave such thrilling 
accounts of their needs, that public meetings to devise measures for relief were 
held in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Societies for the establishment of 
schools and forwarding of supplies were speedily formed ; the " Boston Education 
Society," the " Freedmen's Relief Association " of New York, and others, sprang 
into existence early in 1 862. Men and women were at once sent out as teachers. 
They began by first relieving the physical wants of the distressed, and then tried 
to teach them the dignity of labor. The " Port Royal Society" of Philadelphia 
sent funds, provisions, and teachers. Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburg 
sent workers and money. Societies multiplied so rapidly that it was finally 
deemed advisable to consolidate them; and it was accordingly done in 1866, the 
combined bodies taking the title of the "American Freedmen's Union Commis- 
sion." This colossal organization worked in perfect harmony with the American 
Missionary Association for a short time, then gradually withdrew some of its 
branches from the work as reconstruction progressed, and ceased to be a really 
national body. 

From the date of the founding of the school near Fortress Monroe, the 
American Missionary Association pushed its work with exemplary vigor. The 
opening of 1863 brought with it the proclamation of emancipation, and settled 
forever the question of the condition of negro fugitives who escaped to the Union 
lines. Then the North put forth its strength. Hundreds of refined and delicate 
ladies voluntarily engaged in the work of teaching the blacks — living amid cheer- 
less, surroundings, on poor fare, and meeting with contempt and vulgar ostracism, 
which many a one who was guilty of it then would to-day be ashamed of. At 
Hampton, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, day and Sabbath schools for the negroes 



598 TEACHERS THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU. 

were held in the colored churches ; evening schools for adults were established, 
and men and women flocked to them after the fatigues of the day. On the 
estate of ex- Governor Wise, of Virginia, near Norfolk, the Missionary Associa- 
tion established schools, and the Governor's mansion became a school and a 
home for colored teachers. 

Wherever the freed negroes gathered, as at Newbern in North Carolina, 
at Nashville in Tennessee, on Roanoke Island, in the Port Royal Islands, at 
Vicksburg, at Columbus, at Memphis, at President Island, at Camps Fisk and 
Shiloh, teachers were furnished, charities were bestowed, and the good work 
went nobly on. In 1864 the Association's workers in the field of the South 
numbered 250, mainly employed in Virginia and along the line of the Mississippi. 
In Louisiana General Banks had introduced an efficient system of public instruc- 
tion, supported by a military tax, and there, too, the Association sent its teachers. 
The colored troops enlisted in the Union armies were instructed, and while the 
negroes rested from drill, they pored over the Readers and text-books which had 
been distributed among them. 

The bodily needs of the freedmen were always as great and extreme as their 
spiritual necessities. Thousands died of neglect and starvation. The hand of 
Northern charity could not reach one-third of the sufferers. Many died under 
the despair and unrest occasioned by their change of condition. They became 
wanderers, and set out upon long journeys hither and yon, blindly straying toward 
some dimly-defined goal. Their darkened minds were impressed with the belief 
that somewhere a great material heritage awaited them. They were in an atti- 
tude of intense suspense when the war ended. Virtually the wards of the 
National Government, which had been compelled to undertake their support 
wherever they claimed aid, they relied implicitly upon the promises given them. 
Unable to help themselves, or to understand the dignity of the future to which 
they had suddenly been introduced, they could but hope and wait. 

Behind the army of Sherman, and the forces which entered Richmond, 
marched resolute teachers. Schools were established in the slave-marts of 
Savannah, and were in due time placed under the control of the American 
Missionary Association. In Augusta, in Charleston, in Wilmington, and Rich- 
mond, teachers did all they could to shape the minds of the negroes to a sense 
of the responsibilities of manhood and the dignity of womanhood. Early in 
March of 1865 the Freedmen's Bureau was formed, and placed under the direc- 
tion of General O. O. Howard, who, as its chief commissioner, did much to aid 
the colored man in maintaining his rights. The Bureau established schools 
wisely and well ; and under its fostering care many now prosperous institutions 
were started and maintained, until they showed their beneficent character, and 
received large support from private charities. 

As the Missionary Association had been from the first frankly unsectarian, 
it from time to time received the cordial cooperation of the different churches. 
The Wesleyan Methodists went into its work with the fervor which characterizes 
all their movements. The Free-Will Baptists supported many of its teachers. 
The National Council of Congregational Churches, which assembled in Boston 



DONATIONS — THE PEABODY FUND. 599 

in June of 1865, recommended the raising of a quarter of a million of dollars, 
to be placed in the hands of the Missionary Association, for carrying on the 
work among the freedmen. This generous gift came into play in 1866, and 
orphan asylums and normal schools were founded. The first asylum was 
located at Wilmington in North Carolina; the second, founded by a donation 
from Hon. I. Washburn of Worcester, Massachusetts, at Atlanta, Georgia. 

Aid from abroad meantime came generously in. Great Britain sent more 
than $1,000,000 in money and clothing to the freedmen. The envoys of the 
Missionary Association were gladly and hospitably received in England, Scot- 
land and Wales. 

With the advent of reconstruction came a change in the aspect of the educa- 
tional situation. The Southern people were not satisfied to see the black men 
elevated to political power ; and in many States the most barbarous and, in 
some cases, murderous measures of intimidation were used to prevent the negro 
from gaining instruction, and from demonstrating his right to be a man. Mob 
violence, Ku-Klux mysteries, and social ostracisms were tried as agencies to 
deter Northern teachers from doing their good work. But the labor was con- 
tinued as zealously as before. Churches were founded, the normal schools were 
liberally aided and encouraged in their work of equipping colored teachers, and 
wherever one teacher fainted in the ranks, another was quickly found to supply 
his or her place. 

The operation of the Peabody fund, and the constant beneficence of the 
wealthy in the North and West, are still doing much to second the efforts which the 
Southern people are now themselves making in the cause of free public educa- 
tion. The negroes have as yet done but little to help themselves ; they are not 
property holders to any extent, nor do they seem likely to become such, until 
they have been educated for at least a generation. Instances of thrift and 
thorough independence among them are not wanting, it is true ; but the mass of 
negro males in the Southern States aid comparatively little in paying for the 
school privileges which they receive, under the operation of school laws in most 
of the reconstructed commonwealths. 

The North has done much ; yet it is by no means a proper time for it to 
relax its efforts. There never was a period when the money, the intelligence 
and the energy of Northern people were so much needed in the cause of educa- 
tion in the South as now. There was never a time when so much real missionary 
work could be done among the negroes. Now that they are beginning to take 
active part as citizens in the affairs of their sections they need the best instruc- 
tion and the wisest advice. Their ignorance has already been made the means of 
infamous tyranny ; their accession to political power has been marked by much 
injustice and wrong, of which they have been unwittingly the instruments; and 
the North owes it to them and to herself to aid in rescuing them from the adven- 
turers into whose clutches they have fallen. 

The seven chartered normal schools which have grown up under the Ameri- 
can Missionary Association in the South are annually equipping fine corps of 
teachers for colored schools. Hampton, in Virginia ; Berea College, on the border 



600 THE NORMAL SCHOOLS FOR NEGROES. 

line between the blue grass and the mountain regions of Kentucky ; Fisk Uni- 
versity, at Nashville, Tennessee ; Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Georgia ; Talla- 
dega College, in Alabama ; Tougaloo University, in Mississippi ; and Straight 
University, in New Orleans, are but the precursors of other similar institutions 
to be placed in each Southern State. The Association will not rest contented 
with its labors until it has established normal schools in each of the ex-slave 
States west of the Mississippi river. In addition to these normal institutes, the 
American Missionary Association now has graded and normal schools combined 
in Wilmington, North Carolina ; in Charleston, where the Avery Institute has 
more than four hundred pupils, and owns twenty thousand dollars' worth of 
property; in Greenwood, South Carolina; in Andersonville, Atlanta, Macon, 
and Savannah, Georgia; in Athens, Marion, Mobile, Montgomery, and Selma, in 
Alabama; in Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee ; in Lexington and Louisville, 
Kentucky ; in Columbus, Mississippi ; in Galveston, Texas ; and in Jefferson City, 
Missouri. It has under its charge, mainly in the Southern field, although some 
few of the institutions are on the Pacific coast, forty-seven churches, with a 
membership of 2,898 ; fehe seven normal and nineteen graded and normal schools 
mentioned above ; forty-seven common schools ; three hundred and twenty-three 
. "isters, missionaries and teachers; and more than fourteen thousand pupils. 
As the work of thirteen years, in the face of the most remarkable obstacles and 
with a degraded population born in slavery to operate upon, this merits the 
world's applause. 

The efforts of this brave Association and kindred societies have not been in 
vain. The Southern States at last have school systems of their own, and seem 
likely to maintain them. This alone is worth all that the war cost. 

When Dr. Sears, the able and generous agent of the Peabody fund, went 
South in July of 1867, there was, strictly speaking, no modern school system in 
any of the twelve States in which the fund now operates. Tennessee inaugurated 
one, however, in that same year, under General Eaton. To-day all of those 
twelve States have by law, and all but one or two have in fact, tolerable school 
systems. West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, now have the most effective 
plans. Tennessee, after originally taking the lead, nearly abolished its schools 
on changing its politics three or four years ago. It adopted the miserable county 
system,' with no State Superintendent. But for the last year or two, it has not 
only recovered what it had lost, but is now surpassed in good legislation and 
general activity for schools by no Southern State unless it be Virginia. At this 
time it is, in some respects, the most zealous and active State in the South con- 
cerning educational matters, and the prospects for public schools for years to 
come, at least in the large towns, are most encouraging. 

West Virginia, which adopted a pretty good system early after the war, did 
not suffer much by a change from Republican to Democratic politics. The Con- 
vention for revising the Constitution made no change in that portion relating to 
schools. The latest legislation, leaving it optional with the counties to supple- 
ment the inadequate State taxation, was supposed to be disastrous ; but the 
people have fortunately shown a disposition to vote a liberal tax. 



PREJUDICE TAXATION — MIXED SCHOOLS. 60I 

It is the testimony of Dr. Sears and other intelligent men, who have care- 
fully studied the subject, that three of the Conservative States are now leading 
all the others of the South in education. The feeling in favor of schools of some 
kind is so strong that no ambitious man of any party, in any Southern State, dares 
to oppose public free education. This is certainly a radical change in seven 
years ! 

Arkansas has a good school system, inadequately supported ; Mississippi has 
good schools in the- cities, but very few in the country. Alabama's progress is 
marred by unwise legislation, which gives the Legislature the power to veto the 
laws that only a Board of Education can pass. 

The American Missionary Association, and all Northern enterprises in the 
cause of education, cannot do better for the next decade than to put all their 
money and talent into the States which are now, and are likely from time to time 
to be, under negro rule. In South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the white 
people either stand aloof entirely from many of the public schools, or give them 
but a feeble and reluctant support. Normal schools and thorough teaching are 
needed bitterly in those States, and will be required for ten years to come. 

At the commencement of the educational work in the South, there were 
three grand hindrances to the establishment of public schools. 

The first was prejudice against them as a Northern institution, not adapted 
to the condition of the Southern people. This is now so far overcome as to 
cause no anxiety. 

The second was the burden of taxation; but- men are now beginning, all 
through the South, to see the necessity and economy of free schools. The oppo- 
sition is mainly, to-day, among the ignorant, against whom the enlightened are 
gradually prevailing. 

The third and most potent, still existing, is the dread of mixed schools. 
This should not be understood, as it so often is at the North, as arising from a 
desire on the part of the Southerner to deprive the negro of his chances for an 
education. The objection to mixed schools is a graver one, and may be con- 
sidered sufficient. Until the masses of the black population in the South have 
acquired a higher moral tone than at present characterizes them, it will not 
be well to admit them freely into that communion which an education in the 
same rooms and under the same teachers as white children would give. 

It is noteworthy that where the negroes have full and unrestrained political 
power, as in South Carolina and Louisiana, they have not even demanded 
mixed schools to any extent. They know that it would be useless ; and it 
would be quite as repulsive to most of the blacks as to the whites to have an 
indiscriminate mingling of the races in schools. The negro in the Conserva- 
tive States gains many more educational advantages by a separate school sys- 
tem than he could by mixed schools. Although he rarely pays more than 
one-sixth as much in taxes as his white fellow-citizen, the school law guaran- 
tees him exactly equal school facilities, save in a very few instances, and 
supplies him with buildings and teachers. It would be as absurd on the part 
of Congress to pass a bill a section of which should require the co-education 



602 SCHOOL STATISTICS THE DUTY OF CONGRESS. 

of the sexes in the South, as to enact the mixed school section of the pro- 
posed "civil rights" bill. The good sense of the negroes rejects the section, 
as it enables them to see that a law odious to the whites would have for its 
natural result a cessation of effort in behalf of the blacks. The mixing of the 
races is not a matter for national legislation. Both races now have the vote ; 
each has an equal chance with the other to acquire property and enjoy it; each 
can have all the education that it is willing to buy, besides what is freely given it. 
The course of a Congress which seriously discusses the passage of a bill which 
would block the whole educational system of the South, and at the same time 
never thinks of voting any appropriation to aid in carrying on the work of edu- 
cation there, is certainly open to criticism. The practical tendency of the attempt 
at enforcement of the mixed school clause would be the turning out of doors of 
the million and a-half of white and black children now in the public schools of 
the fifteen ex-slave States. 

Taking the statistics of the Southern public schools, as given in 1871 and 
1872, it will be seen that seven years after the close of the war the impoverished 
Southern States had managed to bring under the operation of a school system 
proportionally four-sevenths as many children as are at school in the North, and 
to keep them at school three-fourths as long.* In view of the fact that great 
numbers of the Southern people (z. e., the negroes) own little or no property, it 
may be asserted that the Southern property holder is paying a much heavier 
school tax than is his Northern brother. 

Congress, instead of threatening the South with the destruction of her school 
system, should take earnest measures to foster and protect education in all the 
Southern States. The ignorance prevalent in that section is the cause of many 
phases of its unhappy condition. It is believed that the registered adult illiter- 
ates in the South constitute more than one-half the adult population. There is 
indisputable evidence to show that the percentage of illiteracy has increased 
among the whites in the South since the outbreak of the war. The reclaiming 
of the "poor whites" from the barbarism in which they have been plunged for 
so many years is certainly a proper subject for the consideration of the National 
Government. If that Government had carefully and wisely supplemented, by an 
equal sum, such a generous donation as the $2,000,000 given by George Peabody 
for education in the South, it would have done no more than its duty. The 
negroes have been called the wards of the nation; yet we find the Southern 
States and a few individuals and societies doing all that is done for them. The 
nation does little but look on. 

* Vide Report of General Ruffner, Virginia Superintendent of Education, for 1873. 



LXVII. 

THE HAMPTON NORMAL INSTITUTE — GENERAL ARMSTRONG'S 
W ORK — FISK .UNIVERSITY — BEREA AND OTHER COLLEGES. 

THE better class of Southerners have been for some time convinced that 
they must help the negroes to an education, as a protective measure. . 
They have discovered that the free laborer must possess a certain amount of 
intelligence, and that he must have the incentives to work and to the acquisition 
of property which knowledge gives. But the great difficulty has been to procure 
a sufficient number of capable colored instructors for work throughout the back- 
country. In the cities white teachers have been readily procured ; but in the 
interior those of their own race were needed for the negroes. To insure the 
elevation of the blacks, they must have before them the daily example of one of 
their own people who has been instructed, and who is anxious to instruct them. 

The establishment of the normal schools mentioned in the previous chapter 
proved the solution of this difficulty. The Northern people, who had been the 
closest observers of the freedmen, readily recognized that the first need was the 
spread of rudimentary education. After the new generation had been taught to 
read and write, had been shown the dignity of labor, and had received the much- 
needed lessons in morality, it would be time enough to found a college with a 
classical course for the freedmen, or to insist on the privilege for them of entrance 
into the colleges now occupied by the whites. So the sensible Northerners went 
at the work of educating negro teachers. 

"What the negro needs at once," wrote General Samuel C. Armstrong, in his 
report on the system and condition of the Hampton Normal Institute, made to 
the Virginia Superintendent of Education in 1872, "is elementary and industrial 
education. The race wiir succeed or fail as it shall devote itself with energy to 
agriculture and the mechanic arts, or avoid these pursuits, and its teachers must 
be inspired with the spirit of hard work, and acquainted with the ways that lead 
to material success. An imitation of Northern models will not do. Right 
methods of work at the South must be created, not copied, although the under- 
lying principle is everywhere the same." This is the truth, and those of the 
negroes who have been taught under such men as General Armstrong are telling 
it to their fellows. 

General Armstrong, who had been Colonel of the Eighth Regiment of United 
States colored troops during the war, was the chief official of the Freedmen's 
Bureau at Hampton when the thousands of blacks were helplessly gathered there. 
As early as 1867, he had set forth, in an able article, the need of normal schools 
for the colored people. The son of a missionary who was for sixteen years the 
Minister of Public Instruction in the Hawaiian kingdom, General Armstrong thor- 

39 

\ 



604 "HAMPTON NORMAL INSTITUTE" FISK UNIVERSITY. 

oughly understood the establishment of schools upon a "manual labor" basis, as 
they had been established in the Sandwich Islands. A man of quick sympathies, 
tremendous will and iron courage, he determined to see what the manual labor 
school would do for the freedmen and freedwomen. With the cooperation of the 
American Missionary Association, he began his work and, in April of 1868, in- 
augurated the labors of the institution which was chartered in 1 867 by the Virginia 
Legislature as the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, with a board of 
eminent Northern gentlemen as trustees. General Howard, as head of the Freed- 
men's Bureau, helped the work generously ; money was given, a large farm was 
purchased, and in 1872 the school received its first aid from Virginia, in land- 
scrip to the amount of $95,000, bestowed on the institution in its character of agri- 
cultural college. Thus encouraged, the school prospered, and colored pupils nocked 
to it from nearly all the States of the South. The division of labor and study 
partaken by both male and female pupils has been satisfactory to both teachers 
and scholars, and the pecuniary results have been better than were anticipated. 
Each male student has, each week, from a day and a-half to two days' labor on 
the farm, for which he is credited a fair sum. The young women are provided 
with an industrial department, where they are taught to use sewing-machines, 
and are familiarized with all the ordinary duties of housekeeping. There is a 
printing-office attached to the school, and a monthly paper is issued by the labor 
of the scholars. One of the fundamental principles of the school is that nothing 
shall be given which can be earned by the pupil, and this has the desired effect 
of encouraging a spirit of independence. Since the founding of the institution, 
it has sent out nearly one hundred well-trained teachers, earnest, honest Christian 
men and women, who propose to devote their lives to the elevation of their race. 
At the closing exercises of the term of 1874, when a large class graduated, 
Virginians and New Englanders united in pronouncing the school a thorough 
success, and one of the most effective agents for the elevation of the negro. 

The normal work has had great and encouraging growth in Tennessee. The 
people of Nashville had the problem of the care of freedmen presented to them 
early in 1862, and in 1867 the Freedmen's Bureau and the American Missionary 
Association together had succeeded in securing the charter of Fisk University in 
that city. Early in 1 867 the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and other 
Tennesseans announced that "the best way to permanently establish and per- 
petuate schools among the colored people is to establish good normal training 
schools for the education of teachers." The University was developed from the 
Fisk school, opened in 1866, and named for General Clinton B. Fisk, who was 
for a time in charge of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville. The 
attendance at this school had averaged over a thousand pupils, until Nashville 
herself adopted a public school system. The Missionary Association then placed 
a suitable location for buildings at the disposition of the trustees of the new 
University, and a little band of the students, young men and women, went out 
into the North to sing the " heart-songs " in which the slaves used to find such 
consolation, and by means of concerts to secure the money with which to erect 
new University buildings. The success of that campaign, in this country and in 



"JUBILEE HALL" BEREA COLLEGE. 6O3 

England, is now a matter of history. The "Jubilee Singers" have found the 
means to build Jubilee Hall, an edifice which would be an ornament to any 
university, and around which will in time be grouped many others. 

This University began with the alphabet in 1 867. It teaches it still, but it 
offers in addition a college classical course of four years, with a preparatory 
course of three years, and two normal courses of two years each. The following 
paragraph from a report of a recent commencement will show what progress 
the ex-slaves have already made : 

"On Thursday the freshman class in college was examined in Virgil's yEneid, Geometry, 
and Botany, the latter with the sophomores. The sophomore class was examined in the De 
Amicitia and De Senectute of Cicero, and Livy, in Latin; in Homer's Iliad, in Greek, and 
Botany, in all of which the members of this class acquitted themselves with marked ability, 
showing conclusively that the people of the colored race are capable of acquiring and mastering 
the most difficult studies, and attaining the highest culture given by our best colleges. The 
promptness and beauty of their translations, together with their accuracy, showing a knowledge 
of the structure of the language as well as the thought of the classics they translated, was most 
gratifying to the friends of education, as well as to their instructors. So, too, in Botany, pursued 
but a single term, the examination was most satisfactory in the knowledge of the terminology of 
the science, the principles of classification, and the ability to analyze plants, explain their struct- 
ure, and determine their order and species in the vegetable world." 

The normal instruction of Fisk University is constantly supplying the colored 
race with efficient and pious teachers. The privations which the negro will 
inflict upon himself for the sake of maintaining himself in the University (for it 
is not, like Hampton, a manual labor school) are almost incredible. The Univer- 
sity stands upon the site of Fort Gillam, in a beautiful section of Nashville, and 
the town negroes never pass it without a lingering look at the doors of the build- 
ing, as if they all would enter if they could. 

At Bcea College, near the old estates of Cassius M. Clay, the famous 
abolitionist, in Madison county, Kentucky, the spectacle of both races studying 
in the same institution in completest harmony may be seen. A prosperous 
school was started at Berea several years before the war by a missionary who 
had been successful in founding antislavery churches in the South ; but when 
the John Brown raid occurred, the slaveholders broke up Berea. At the close of 
the war the teachers returned, and found their homes and buildings uninjured. 
They at once opened a school into which both races were received upon equal 
footing. This was a source of great astonishment to the white Kentuckians for a 
time ; but they finally began to send their children, and now the regular propor- 
tion of white students is about two-fifths, many of whom are young ladies. The 
annual commencement exercises bring together audiences of a thousand or fifteen 
hundred persons, black and white, ex- Confederate and Unionist, who look ap- 
provingly upon the progress of students of both colors. Rev. E. H. Fairchild, 
brother of the President of Oberlin, presides over the faculty. Donations from 
the North are rapidly building up this institution, one of the few in the ex-slave 
States where blacks and whites study harmoniously together. 

The University at Atlanta met with much opposition ; the Georgians seemed 
disinclined to believe in the sincerity of those who had come to teach the negroes. 



606 ATLANTA AND TALLADEGA UNIVERSITIES. 

After the institution, which was incorporated in 1867, had been in operation two 
years, it was visited by a committee of prominent Southern ge'ntlemen, many of 
.whom were severely prejudiced against negro schools, but who were forced 
to admit, in their report made to the Governor of the State, that " the system 
of intellectual and moral training adopted in the school" was eminently practical. 
It was evident, also, from other sentences in their report, that they began to 
believe in the possibility of the education of the negro masses, as they added 
that the satisfactory answers of the pupils "to questions tended to define the 
character of their moral training, their polite behavior, general modesty of de- 
meanor, and evident economy and neatness of dress, are indicative of a convic- 
tion on the part of the pupils that they are being educated for usefulness, and 
not for mere ostentation or to gratify a selfish ambition." They found that the 
African could stand very rigid tests in algebra and geometry, and " fully com- 
prehend the construction of difficult passages in the classics." Atlanta University 
has two hundred and fifty students, has received aid from the Legislature, and 
annually sends out well-educated colored teachers from its normal department. 

The college at Talladega, Alabama, was chartered in 1869, and has already 
sent out many faithful workers. A paragraph from the pen of Rev. George 
Whipple, of New York, concerning a recent examination of the classes at Talla- 
dega, contains some important testimony: 

"Those who know anything of the educational work among the colored people need not 
be told that they are seldom at fault in studies exercising mainly the memory ; but many, if not 
most, have doubted their ability in studies requiring the exercise of the reasoning faculty. 
There was here, however, no failure. On the contrary, that which made the most marked 
impression on those who were familiar with schools in the North twenty and twenty-five years 
ago, was the well-sustained examination in English Grammar and Algebra, showing a power of 
analysis, under the circumstances, really surprising." 

In the theological department of this University, young colored men are pre- 
pared for the ministry, and are given an impulse in the direction of real mission- 
ary work, so much needed among the reckless emotional negroes in the interior 
districts of the South. 

The Straight University at New Orleans has nearly 250 pupils, and among 
the dusky attendants there are diligent students in Greek, Latin, and Algebra. 
The importance of this institution to the negroes of the South-west cannot be 
overestimated. In no other State does the negro, when left to himself, touch 
so closely upon barbarism as in the remote portions of Louisiana ; and the 
training of colored teachers who can reach the untaught masses is a work of 
the highest beneficence. The programme of the University is certainly ample; 
how necessary its existence to the good of the State is may be understood from 
the statement of what it proposes to do : 

" To train the half-heathen preachers of this State into a useful Christian ministry ; to give 
its colored legislators so much knowledge of history and law as to make their votes intelligent, 
and to awaken as much self-respect as shall lift them above temptation to take a bribe ; to furnish 
teachers to our crudely-organized public schools ; to gather into the fold of the Church this vast 
Roman Catholic population ; to win them to us by showing them that Straight University is, in 



STRAIGHT UNIVERSITY TOUGALOO. 60J 

its instructors, buildings, libraries, apparatus, discipline, Christian courtesies, scholarship, and 
general management, wholly superior to, and broader than, their parochial and conventual 
schools ; to make it safe for the republic that the newly- created citizens of Louisiana should retain 
their franchise, and to prevent Louisiana from being Mexicanized by frequent revolutions ; in 
brief, to infuse a wholesome Christian life into the mingled mass of negro and Latin blood, — is a 
work which must be done for its own sake, for the sake of the nation, and for Christ's sake." 

There is but one chartered normal school for the tens of thousands of freed- 
men in Mississippi, the one heretofore mentioned as at Tougaloo. It has nearly 
300 students ; the manual labor system has been introduced to some extent ; the 
normal school is successful ; but half-a-dozen such institutions, amply endowed, 
are necessary to give proper facilities for education to the swarming masses of 
blacks. 

It has been the fashion in both North and South to believe that the negro 
would prove susceptible of cultivation only to a certain point. But the universal 
testimony of the mass of careful observers is that the negro can go as far in 
mental processes as the white child. The blacks have wonderful memories and 
strong imitative propensities; eloquence, passionate and natural; a strange and 
subtle sense of rhythm and poetry; and it is now pretty well settled that there 
are no special race limitations. Why, then, should they not go forward to a 
good future ? Is it not the duty of that section which gave them political poy/.er 
before they were fit to use it, to give them every opportunity to fit themselves 
for its exercise ? It will be long before they can, of their own effort, supply the 
funds needed for their education ; until they can, the North should not fail to 
foster all the schools which, like the normal institutions whose history has toen 
reviewed in this chapter, sow the good seed. 

The schools are doing much to lift up the negro's idea of the dignity of 
religion. Emphatically Christian institutions, they strive to inculcate that moral- 
ity and self-denial which it seems so difficult for the blacks to exercise. . Although 
there are many exemplary Christians among the freedmen and freedwomen, it 
may safely be said that the majority do not allow their religion to interfere with 
their desires. They believe in the spasmodic shouting, stamping, and groaning 
which characterize their meetings as essentials of true worship ; they are excited 
to the most exalted state by the rude and picturesque harangues of their preach- 
ers, and obey them implicitly, so far as they understand them. But they often 
make their camp-meetings and revival assemblies the scenes of indecent orgies, 
and in some States where great numbers of ignorant negroes are gathered 
together, they turn the church into a den of roystering drunkards. The preach- 
ers are sometimes very immoral, and now and then, after exhorting for an hour 
or two in such a violent manner that one might imagine them possessed by the 
spirit, they will join in the worst carousals of their parishioners. But wherever 
education goes, this conduct ceases. The missionaries from the normal schools 
strive against the besetting sins of the African, and are gradually helping 
him. The school-house and the church together, with intelligent and earnest 
advisers in each, will transform the character of the freedman in another 
generation. 



608 COLORED MEN IN THE MINISTRY. 

The negroes have a profusion of churches, organized by themselves, in all the 
large cities of the South and South-west ; in Memphis, in New Orleans, in Rich- 
mond, and in Charleston the churches are very well sustained, and are attended 
by immense congregations. The preaching is sometimes absolutely fine ; there 
are colored men of great culture and natural talent in the ministry ; but, as a 
rule, the ministers are rude in their language, forcible in their illustrations, and 
possessed of an enthusiasm which, whether or not the proof of a rare spirituality, 
is certainly inspiring to any one who witnesses it. The emotional part of the 
black man's worship is, of course, that which develops the greatest number of 
peculiarities. It will always, even when the race is educated, remain a striking 
feature in his churches ; but will be chastened and subdued. The rapturous 
shoutings, the contortions of the body, the desire to dance and to yell, the mys- 
terious trances, now-a-days seen, as they were before the war, in assemblages of 
blacks overcome with religious excitement, will be greatly modified, but will 
never be lost sight of. Under powerful mental excitement of any kind, the 
American negro finds it difficult to " keep still." The exuberance of his animal 
spirits gets relief only in dancing, in gambols high in air, in grotesque gestures ; 
and this is all the more noticeable from the fact that in repose his favorite atti- 
tude is slouching and inactive. 

The theological department in the excellent Howard University at Washing- 
ton, and the classes in theology in the other universities, are kept well recruited, 
and the graduates go out to teach the negroes a "different kind of religion from 
mere shouting and confusion." In the back-country, log churches are built; in 
the towns, houses are rented, or neat brick edifices are erected. The ministers 
who go into the interior districts make efforts to have the negroes from several 
contiguous plantations unite in building a church, and are generally successful. 
In many sections negroes have been converted from practices resembling bar- 
barism to sincere Christian worship. But for the millions of freedmen and women 
in the South the work which has already been done is only as a drop in the 
bucket. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are needed to supply this people with 
the barest necessities of their intellectual improvement ; a steady charity for ten 
years to come will be in no wise mistaken. They need, above all, to be taught 
how to help themselves ; and by the normal schools and the complete education 
of the most promising individuals of their race, that will be soonest accomplished. 



LXVIII. 

NEGRO SONGS AND SINGERS. 

THE negro would deserve well of this country if he had given it nothing but 
the melodies by which he will be remembered long after the carping critics 
who refuse to admit that he is capable of intellectual progress are forgotten. His 
songs of a religious nature are indisputable proofs of the latent power for an 
artistic development which his friends have always claimed for him. They are 
echoes from the house of bondage, cries in the night, indistinct murmurs from an 
abyss. They take directly hold upon the Infinite. They are sublimest and 
most touching when they partake of the nature of wails and appeals. They 
have strange hints and gleanfs of nature in tfciem, mingled with intense spiritual 
fervor. In this song, which the toilers in the tobacco factories of Virginia used 
to sing, there is a wild faith, and a groping after the proper poetry in which to 
express it, which touch the heart : 

" May de Lord — He will be glad of me, 
In de heaven He '11 rejoice ; 
In de heaven once, in de heaven twice, 
In de heaven He '11 rejoice. 

Bright sparkles in de churchyard, 
Give light unto de tomb; 

Bright summer, spring 's ober, 
Sweet flowers in de'r bloom." 

This is the incoherence of ignorance ; but when sung, no one can doubt the 
yearning, the intense longing which prompted it. The movement of the melodies 
is strong and sometimes almost resistless ; the rhythm is perfect ; the measure is 
steady and correct. 

But little idea of the beauty and inspiration of the " slave music " can be 
conveyed by the mere words. The quaintness of the wild gestures which 
accompany all the songs cannot be described. At camp- meetings and revival- 
gatherings the slaves give themselves up to contortions, to stampings of feet, 
clappings of hands, and paroxysms affecting the whole body, when singing. The 
simplest hymns are sung with almost extravagant intensity. 

The songs are mainly improvisations. But few were ever written ; they 
sprang suddenly into use. They arose out of the ecstasy occasioned by the rude 
and violent dances on the plantation ; they were the outgrowth of great and 
unavoidable sorrows, which forced the heart to voice its cry; or they bubbled up 
from the springs of religious excitement. Sometimes they were simply the 
expression of the joy found in vigorous, healthy existence ; but of such there 



6lO NEGRO SONGS IMPROVISATIONS. 

are few. The majority of the negro songs have a plaintive undertone. They 
are filled with such passionate outbursts as the following: 

"Nobody knows de trouble I see, Lord, 
Nobody knows de trouble I see ; 
Nobody knows de trouble I see, Lord, 

Nobody knows like Jesus ! 
Brudders, will you pray for me, 

And help me to drive old Satan away?" 

The improvisations are in some cases remarkable. A student at the Hampton 
Normal School has given to the public a long rhapsody on the judgment day, im- 
provised by an old slave who was densely ignorant, but who embodied his dreams 

in song, as follows : 

"I'm a gwine to tell yo' bout de comin' of de Savior, 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
Dar's a better day a comin', 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
When my Lord speaks to his Fader, 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
Says Fader, I 'm tired of bearin', 

P"ar' you well, Far' you well ; 
Tired o' bearin' for pore sinners, 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
Oh! preachers, fold your Bibles, 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
Prayer makers, pray no more, 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
For de last soul's converted, 

Far' you well, Far' you well ; 
In dat great gittirt- up mornin ', 

Far' you well, Faf you well." 

The terrors of the judgment day are portrayed with a vivid and startling 
eloquence, and these verses are usually sung with a rude dramatic force which 

is really fine : 

"Gabriel, blow your trumpet! 
Lord, how loud shall I blow it? 
Loud as seven peals of thunder, 
Wake de sleeping nations ; 
Den yo' see pore sinners risin', 
See de dry bones a creepin', 

Far' you well, Far' you well. 

" Den yo' see de world on fire, 
Yo' see de moon a bleedin', 
See de stars a fallin', 
See de elements meltin', 
See de forked lightnin'. 
Hear de rumblin' thunder; 
Earth shall reel and totter, 
Hell shall be uncapped, 
De dragon shall be, loosened, 
Far' you well, pore sinner, 

Far' you well, Far' you welL" 



HYMNS — CAMP-MEETING SONGS — BANDS. 6 1 I 

Nothing can exceed in beauty and fervor this little hymn, sprung out of great 
sorrow and affliction. It lays hold upon Heaven, and will not be thrust aside : 

" O Lord, O my Lord, 
O my good Lord, 

Keep me from sinkin ' down ! 

my Lord, O my good Lord, 
Keep me from sinkin' down! 

1 tell you what I mean to do, 
Keep me from sinkin ' down ; 

I mean to go to Heaven too, 
Keep me from sinkin ' down ! " 

One of the most notable of the songs refers to a " great camp-meeting in 
the promised land," and is said to have been first sung by a company of slaves, 
who were not allowed to sing or pray where the master could hear them ; but 
when he died their mistress granted them the privilege of singing and praying in 
their cabins at night, and they often joyfully sang this hymn : 

Dere 's a better day comin ', don 't you get weary, 

Better day a comin', don't you get, &c, (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de Promised Land, 

Oh slap your hands childron, don't, &c, 

Slap your hands childron, don't, &c, (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de Promised Land. 

Oh pat your foot childron, don 't you get weary, 

Pat your foot childron, don't, &c, (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de Promised Land. 

Cho. — Gwine to live wid God forever, 

Live wid God forever, (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de Promised Land. 

Oh, feel de Spirit a movin ', don't you, &c, 

Feel de Spirit movin ', don 't, &c. , (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de, &c. 

Oh now I'm gettin' happy, don't you get weary, 

Now I'm gettin' happy, don't, &c, (bis) 

Dere 's* a great camp-meetin' in de, &c. 

I feel so happy, don 't you get weary, 

Feel so happy, don 't you get weary, (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de, &c. 

Cho. — Oh, fly an' nebber tire, 

Fly an' nebber tire, (bis) 

Dere 's a great camp-meetin ' in de Promised Land. 

Throughout the South, wherever the negroes have gathered into large com- 
munities by themselves, one will generally find a very good brass band ; yet 
probably not one of its members can read music. They play by rote with re- 
markable accuracy, and they learn a song by hearing it once. The rhythm 
mastered, they readily catch the tune, and . never forget it. Every one sings ; 
man, woman and child croon over their toil, but never with that joyous abandon 
so characteristic of other races. In the churches the hymns are often "lined 



6l2 ENTHUSIASM OF NEGRO SINGERS. 

out" — that is, each line is read by the deacon or preacher, and then sung by the 

congregation ; but this is quite unnecessary, as all are usually familiar with the 

words. In hymns and songs which are purely enthusiastic, the lines are never 

read ; the worshipers will sometimes spontaneously break into a rolling chorus, 

which almost shakes the rafters of the church. Then their enthusiasm will die 

away to a tearful calm, broken only now and again by sobs and "Amens!" 

The appended hymns, sung in seasons of great enthusiasm by the negroes in 

and around Chattanooga, Tennessee, will serve to indicate the character of all 

of that class : 

" Oh, yonder come my Jesus, 

Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! 
Oh, how do you know it's Jesus? 

Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! 
I know Him by his garments, 
I know him by his garments. 
His ship is heav-i-ly loaded, 
His ship is heav-i-ly loaded, 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! 
It's loaded wid bright angels, 
It's loaded wid bright angels, 

Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! 
Oh, how do yo' know dey are angels? \ 

Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! 
I know dem by deir shining, 
I know dem by deir shining, 

Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! 

* * * * 

;i O, John! my Jesus' comin', 
He is comin' in de mornin' ; 
Jesus' comin' ; He's comin' by de lightning, 
Jesus' comin' ; He's comin' in de rainbow. 
Don't you want to go to Heaven? 

Jesus' comin." 

* *• * * «■ 

" Oh, rock away chariot, 
Rock all my crosses away ; 
Rock me into de Heavens. ^ • 

I wish't I was in Heaven — 
I wish't I was at home. 
I wish't I was in Heaven — 
Lord, I wish't I was at home ! " 

The pilgrimages of the " Jubilee " and Hampton singers through this coun- 
try and England, and the brilliant success which attended their concerts, is a 
notable event in the history of the American negro. When the Jubilee Singers 
first went North to earn money for the University which was giving them their 
education, they met with some slights — were now and then called "niggers" 
and " negro minstrels," and were variously scoffed at. Here and there in the 
North and West they were refused admission to hotels on account of their 
color ; their success was at first a matter of doubt ; but their mission pleaded its 
way into the hearts of men when the sweet melodies and wild burdens of their 



THE "JUBILEE" AND "HAMPTON" SINGERS. 613 

songs were heard. In all the great cities of the North their concerts were at- 
tended by large audiences ; Henry Ward Beecher welcomed them in Brooklyn, 
introducing them to his congregation at a Sunday evening prayer- meeting, 
when they sang some of their most effective songs ; and straightway thereafter 
they were the rage in the Metropolis as well as in Brooklyn. Their tour 
through the Eastern States was productive of much profit, and the little band 
of singers carried home twenty thousand dollars to place in the treasury of Fisk 
University, as the result of their first campaign in the North. 

Encouraged by this success, Prof. George L. White, who originally conceived 
the idea of teaching these emancipated slaves to sing the plantation hymns of 
the old times, and to give a series of concerts embodying them, took the singers 
to England. All the world knows how enthusiastically they were received in 
Great Britain. The Queen, the nobility, and the great middle class heard them 
sing, gave them kind words and money, and praised them highly ; and in March 
of 1874 this little band of blacks had collected ten thousand pounds, to be used 
to pay for the building of Jubilee Hall, at the University at Nashville. Of the 
eleven singers, eight are emancipated slaves. 

The Hampton Student Singers at first numbered seventeen. They made 
their first appearance in 1872, under the direction of Mr. Thomas P. Fenner, of 
Providence, Rhode Island, who was of peculiar service in aiding them to a faith- 
ful musical rendering of the original slave songs. The singers were all regular 
students of the Hampton Normal Institute, and, even while journeying on their 
concert tour, carried their school-books with them. Their songs were heard wit! 
delight throughout the Middle, Eastern, and Western States, and their concert 
have been attended with financial success. 

The spirituality, the pathos, the subtle plaintiveness of the fresh, pure voices 
of these bands of black singers, invest the commonest words with a beauty and 
poetry which cannot be understood until one hears the songs. Once while 
listening to the singing of " Dust an' Ashes," one of the sweetest and sublimest 
chorals ever improvised, I tried in vain to analyze its mysterious fascination. The 
words were few and often repeated ; the melody was from time to time almost 
monotonous. I could not fix the charm ; yet the tears stood in my eyes when 
the wild chant was over, — and I was not the only one of the large audience gath- 
ered to hear the singing who wept. I give some of the words; but they will 
hardly serve to convey to the reader's mind any idea of the beauty of the choral: 

"Dust, dust an' ashes 
• Fly over on my grave. 

Dust, dust an' ashes 

Fly over on my grave, (bis) 
An' de Lord shall bear my spirit home, (bis) 
Dey crucified my Savior 
And nailed him to de cross, (bis) 
An' de Lord shall bear my spirit home. 
He rose, he rose, 

He rose from de dead, (repeat) 
An' de Lord shall bear my spirit home." 



6l4 SPECIMENS OF SPIRITUAL SONGS. 

One of the most effective of the spiritual songs is " Babylon 's Fallin'," which 
is often used at Hampton Institute as a marching song. The words are as 
follows : 

" Pure city, 
Babylon 's fallin' to rise no mo'. 
Pure city, 

Babylon 's fallin' to rise no mo'. 
Oh, Babylon 's fallin', fallin', fallin', 
Babylon 's fallin' to rise no mo'. 
Oh, Jesus tell you once befo' 
Babylon 's fallin' to rise no mo' ; 
To go in peace and sin no mo'— 
Babylon. 's fallin' to rise no mo'." 

Another note of aspiration is sounded in the hymn " Swing Low, Sweet 
Chariot," the music of which is full of earnest prayer : 

" Oh, swing low, sweet chariot ; 

Swing low, sweet chariot, (bis) 
I don't want to leave me behind. 
Oh de good ole chariot swing so low, 

Good old chariot swing so low, 
I don't want to leave me behind." 

Even the religious hymns and songs are not devoid of that humor with which 
the negro is so freely endowed, and some of the words to hymns intended to be 
of the most serious character are highly ludicrous, as when we are informed, 
concerning a " pore sinner," that 

" Vindictive vengeance on him fell, 
Enough to sqush a world to hell;" 

or when we hear a hundred negroes loudly singing — ■ 

" Jesus ride a milk-white hoss, 
Ride him up and down de cross — 
Sing Hallelujah !" 

It is difficult to repress a smile when listening to the story of the deluge and 
Noah's voyage, as detailed in the popular choral hymn entitled, " De Ole Ark a- 
Moverin' Along." The last verse will give the reader a taste of its quality : 

"Forty days an' forty nights, de rain it kep' a fallin', 
De ole ark a-moverin', a-moverin' along; 
De wicked dumb de trees, an' for help dey kep' a callin', 

De ole ark a-moverin', &c, 
Dat awful rain, she stopped at last, de waters dey subsided, 

De old ark a-moverin', &c, 
An' dat old ark wid all on board on Ararat she rided, 
De old ark a-moverin', &c. 
CHORUS — Oh, de ole ark a-moverin'," &c. 



LAUGHABLE SONGS — HINTS AT DELIVERANCE. 615 

A hymn called the " Danville Chariot," which is very popular with the 
negroes in Virginia, has this verse : 

" Oh shout, shout, de deb'l is about ; 
Oh shut yo' do' an' keep him out ; 

I don' want to stay here no longer. 
For he is so much-a like-a snaky in de grass, 
Ef you don' mind he will get you at las', 
I don' want to stay here no longer. 
CHORUS — Oh, swing low, sweet chariot, "-&c. 

The quaintness of the following often induces laughter, although it is always 
sung with the utmost enthusiasm : 

" Gwine to sit down in de kingdom, I raly do believe 

Whar Sabbaths have no end. 
Gwine to walk about in Zion, I raly do believe,- 

Whar Sabbaths have no end. 
Whar ye ben, young convert, whar ye ben so long? 
Ben down low in de valley for to pray, 
And I ain't done prayin' yit." 

" Go, Chain de Lion Down, 1 ' is the somewhat obscure title of a hymn in 
which this verse occurs : 

" Do you see dat good ole sister, 
Come a-waggin' up de hill so slow? 
She wants to get to Heaven in due time, 
Before de heaven doors clo'. 
, Go chain de lion down, 

Go chain de lion down, 
Befo' de heaven doors clo'." 

Many years before the period of bondage was over, and when it seemed 
likely to endure so long as the masters pleased, the negroes hinted in their 
hymns at their coming deliverance. They often compared themselves to the 
Israelites, and many of their most touching songs have some allusion to King 
Pharaoh and the hardness of his heart. A few of the more noted of the songs, 
which were the outgrowth of the negro's prophetic instinct that some day he 
should be free, are still sung in the churches and schools. This is a favorite 

among the blacks : 

" Did n't my Lord deliber Daniel, 
Did n't my Lord deliber Daniel, 

And why not ebery man ? 
He delibered Daniel from de lion's den, 
And Jonah from de belly of de whale, 
An' de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace, 
And why not ebery man ? " 

" Go Down, Moses," was another warning of the " wrath to come," which 
those in power did not soon enough accept. It was sung at many a midnight 
meeting, when the masters did not listen ; and the oppressed took comfort as 



6l6 ANALYSIS OF THE NEGRO'S "HEART-MUSIC." 

they joined in its chorus. The free children of parents who were born in slavery 
will look upon this song with a tearful interest : 

" When Israel was in Egypt's land, 

Let my people go ; 
Oppressed so hard dey could not stand, 

Let my people go. 
Go down, Moses, 

Way down in Egypt land, 
Tell ole Pha-roh, 

Let my people go. 

" Thus saith de Lord, bold Moses said, 

i 

Let my people go ; 
If not I '11 smite your first-born dead, 
Let my people go. 

Go down, Moses," &c. 

" No more shall dey in bondage toil, 
Let my people go ; 
Let dem come out wid Egypt's spoil, 
Let my people go. 

Go down, Moses," &c. 

The " first-born " have indeed been smitten, and Israel has come up out of 
Egypt. 

Mr. Theodore F. Seward, of Orange, New Jersey, in his interesting preface 
to the collection of songs sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, makes 
the following remarks, which may help to a proper comprehension of the negro's 
heart-music : 

" A technical analysis of these melodies shows some interesting facts. The 
first peculiarity that strikes the attention is in the rhythm. This is often compli- 
cated, and sometimes strikingly original. But although so new and strange, it is 
most remarkable that these effects are so extremely satisfactory. We see few 
cases of what theorists call mis-form, although the student of musical composi- 
tion is likely to fall into that error long after he has mastered the leading prin- 
ciples of the art. 

" Another noticeable feature of the songs is the entire absence of triple time, 
or three-part measure, among them. The reason for this is doubtless to be found 
in the beating of the foot and, the swaying of the body which are such frequent 
accompaniments of the singing. These motions are in even measure, and in per- 
fect time ; and so it will be found that, however broken and seemingly irregular 
the movement of the music, it is always capable of the most exact measurement. 
In other words, its irregularities invariably conform to the ' higher law ' of the 
perfect rhythmic flow. 

" It is a coincidence worthy of note that more than half the melodies in this 
collection are in the same scale as that in which Scottish music is written ; that 
is, with the fourth and seventh tones omitted. The fact that the music of the 
ancient Greeks is also said to have been written in this scale suggests an inter- 



THE "SPIRITUALS" HOW THEY WERE PRESERVED. 6\J 

esting inquiry as to whether it may not be a peculiar language of nature, or a 
simpler alphabet than the ordinary diatonic scale, in which the uncultivated 
mind finds its easiest expression." 

The teachers attached to the educational mission of the Port Royal Islands 
carefully studied the music of the half-barbarous negroes among whom they were 
stationed, and the result was an excellent collection of slave songs, which, with- 
out their efforts, would have been entirely lost. 

The old planters sometimes say, with a shake of the head and a frown, that 
the negroes no longer sing "as they used to when they were happy." It is true 
that the freedmen do not sing as of yore ; that they sing as much, however, 
there is little doubt. We have seen that the better class of their songs is filled 
with a vein of reproachful melancholy, that it everywhere has the nature of an 
appeal for help, a striving for something spiritual, dimly seen, and but half under- 
stood. These were the songs which the slaves sung at their work, but since 
their emancipation they are no longer compelled to voice their talents in such 
sombre music. The Port Royal teachers took down from the lips of the colored 
people hundreds of songs whose crude dialect and cruder melancholy rendered 
the task very difficult. 

According to the testimony of the teachers the negroes always keep exquisite 
time in singing, and readily sacrifice a word and the sense attached to it if it 
stands in the way of the rhythm. The voices have a delicate and mellow tone 
peculiar to the colored race. There is rarely part singing, as it is not generally 
understood, and yet the Port Royal teachers say that when a number of blacks 
are singing together no two appear to sing the same thing. The leaders start 
the words of each verse, improvising many tunes, and the others, who " base " 
him, as they call it, will strike in with the version, or when they know the words, 
will join in the solo. They always succeed in producing perfect melody, out 
of whose network the transcribers have found great difficulty in extracting 
sounds that can be properly represented by the gamut. 

The teachers testify that " the chief part of the negro music is civilized 
in its character, partly composed under the influence of association with the 
whites, and partly actually imitated from other music ; but," they add, " in the 
main it appears to be original in the best sense of the word." Passages in some 
of the songs are essentially barbaric in character, and the teachers believe that 
most of the secular songs in use among the negroes contain faint echoes from 
the rude music of the African savages. A gentleman visiting at Port Royal 
is said to have been much struck with the resemblance of some of the tunes 
sung by the watermen there to boatmen's songs he had heard on the Nile. 
Colonel Higginson, who spent some time among the negroes on the South 
Carolina islands, gives a curious description of the way in which negro songs 
were originated. One day, as he was crossing in a small boat from one island 
to another, one of the oarsmen, who was asked for his theory of the origin of the 
spirituals, as the negroes call their songs, said, " Dey start jess out o* curiosity. 
I ben a raise a song mysel' once," and then described to Colonel Higginson that 
on one occasion when a slave he began to sing, " O, de old nigger- driver." 



6l8 THE "SHOUT" RELIGIOUS DANCES. 

Then another said, " Fust ting my mammy tole me was, notin' so bad as nigger- 
drivers." This was the refrain, and in a short time all the slaves in the field had 
made a song which was grafted into their unwritten literature. Another negro, 
in telling Mr. J. Miller McKim, one of the* teachers on the island, how they 
made the songs, said, " Dey work it in, work it in, you know, till dey get it 
right, and das de way." 

The "shout," one of the most peculiar and interesting of the religious cus- 
toms of the slaves, still kept up to some extent among the negroes on the coast, 
is discountenanced by many of the colored preachers now-a-days. It is what may 
be called a prayer-meeting, interspersed with spasmodic enthusiasm. The popu- 
lation of a plantation gathers together in some cabin at evening, and, after 
vociferous prayer by some of the brethren, and the singing of hymns in melan- 
choly cadence by the whole congregation, all the seats are cleared away, and the 
congregation begins the genuine "walk-around" to the music of the "spiritual." 

The following description of the dance, which is a main feature of these shouts, 
appeared in the New York Nation, in 1 867 : 

"The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due 
to a jerking, pitching motion, which agitates the entire shouters, and soon brings 
out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance slowly ; sometimes, as they 
shuffle, they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also 
sung; but more frequently a band composed of some of the best singers and 
of tired shouters stands at the side of the room to " base " the others singing 
the body of the song, and clapping their hands together or on their knees. 
Singing and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often when the shout 
lasts into the middle, of the night, the monotonous thud of the feet prevents sleep 
within half a mile of the 'Praise- House.' " 

I append three or four of the most beautiful of the songs sung by the ne- 
groes of the lowland coast of South Carolina. That entitled " Lord Remember 
Me " attracted universal attention when it first appeared, shortly after the war, 
at the North. It was set to weird music, and had the genuine ballad flavor : 

I HEAR FROM HEAVEN TO-DAY. 

Hurry on, my weary soul, 

And I yearde from heaven to-day, 

My sin is forgiven, and my soul set free, 

And I yearde, etc. 

A baby born in Bethlehem, 

De trumpet sound in de oder bright land; 

My name is called and I must go, 

De bell is a-ringin' in de oder bright world. 

LORD REMEMBER ME. 

Oh Deat' he is a little man, 

And he goes from do' to do' ; 

He kill some souls and he wounded some, 

And he lef some souls to pray. 



SONGS OF SOUTH CAROLINA NEGROES. 619 

Oh, Lord, remember me, 
Do, Lord, remember me; 
Remember me as de year roll round, 
Lord, remember me. 

NOT WEARY YET. 

me not weary yet, (repeat) 

1 have a witness in my heart ; 

O me no weary yet, Brudder Tony, 
Since I ben in de field to fight. 

me, etc. 

1 have a heaven to maintain, 

De bond of faith are on my soul; 
Ole Satan toss a ball at me, 
Him tink de ball would hit my soul; 
De ball for hell and I for heaven. . 

HUNTING FOR THE LORD. 

Hunt till you find him, 

Hallelujah ! 
And a-huntin' for de Lord, 
Till you find him, 

Hallelujah ! 
And a-huntin' for de Lord. 

I SAW THE BEAM IN MY SISTER'S EYE. 

I saw de beam in my sister's eye, 
Can't saw de beam in mine; 
You'd better lef your sister's door, 
Go keep your own door clean. 

And I had a mighty battle, like-a Jacob and de angel, 

Jacob, time of old ; 

I did n't 'tend to lef 'em go, 

Till Jesus bless my soul. 

RELIGION SO SWEET. 

O walk Jordan long road, 
And religion so sweet; 
O religion is good for anything, 
And religion so sweet. 
Religion make you happy, 
Religion gib me patience; 

'member, get religion. 

1 long time ben a huntin', 
I seekin ' for my fortune ; 

O I gwine to meet my Savior, 
Gwine to tell him bout my trials. 
Dey call me boastin' member, 
Dey call me turnback Christian; 
Dey call me 'struction maker, 



40 



620 NEGRO RELIGIOUS SONGS. 

But I don't care what dey call me. 
Lord, trial 'longs to a Christian, 

tell me 'bout religion ; 

1 weep for Mary and Marta, 

I seek my Lord and I find him. 

MICHAEL, ROW THE BOAT ASHORE, 

Michael, row de boat ashore, 
Hallelujah ! 
Michael boat a gospel boat, 

Hallelujah ! 
I wonder where my mudder deh, 
See my mudder on de rock gwine home, 
On de rock" gwine home in Jesus' name; 
Michael boat a music boat, 
Gabriel blow de trumpet horn, 

you mind your boastin' talk ; 
Boastin' talk will sink your soul. 
Brudder, lend a helpin' hand ; 
Sister, help for trim dat boat. 
Jordan's stream is wide and deep ; 
Jesus stand on t' oder side. 

1 wonder if my massa deh ; 

My fader gone to unknown land, 
O de Lord he plant his garden deh. 

I WISH I BEN DERE. 

My mudder, you follow Jesus, 
My sister, you follow Jesus, 
My brudder, you follow Jesus, 
To fight until I die. 

I wish I ben dere, 

To climb Jacob's ladder; 

I wish I ben dere, 

To wear de starry crown. 

JESUS ON THE WATER-SIDE. 

Heaven bell a-ring, I know de road, 
Heaven bell a-ring, I know de road; 
Jesus sittin' on de water-side, 
Do come along, do let us go, 
Jesus sittin' on de water-side. 



LXIX. 

A PEEP AT THE PAST OF VIRGINIA — JAMESTOWN. 
WILLIAMSBURG — YORKTOWN. 



AT Jamestown, on the river James, one comes suddenly upon memorials of a 
vanished past. The Virginia whose life once centred around the village 
on the placid stream has passed away. Jamestown, the first prominent Anglo- 
Saxon settlement on this continent, is to-day a melancholy nook where historic 
memories play at hide T and-seek among moss-grown ruins. The remains of the 
venerable church there are surrounded with a graveyard filled with mouldy 
tombstones, whose inscriptions are scarce- .-aegia^. 

ly legible. Tall trees tangle their roots ^< lllfe^ 

in the brickwork of the decaying tower. 
Silence and desolation brood over this 
ancient edifice, destroyed nearly a century 
and a-half ago. It is supposed to have 
been built a little after Bacon's rebellion in 
1676, and is known to have been in use as 
late as 1733, for in that year a silver bap- 
tismal font was presented to it. Some of 
the pieces of silver plate that belonged to 
the church may still be seen in the library 
of the Theological Seminary near Alex- 
andria. 

After Captain John Smith and his brave 
knights, as well as all the swaggering, 
starveling gallants and tavern-haunting vagabonds who first colonized Jamestown, 
had crumbled into dust and made way for the more enterprising and industrious 
native Virginians, the town was deserted. The transfer of the seat of the Colo- 
nial Government to Williamsburg in the beginning of the eighteenth century 
ruined the prospects of Jamestown, and the swiftly-moving years have now 
swept everything away save this one tower of the old church, the reflection of 
whose image upon the river's gleaming surface seems like a ghost from the past, 
peering out of the depths into which the present has banished it. 

Williamsburg and Yorktown, on the peninsula between the York and James 
rivers, contain some of the most interesting souvenirs of early civilization in 
America. Williamsburg, half-way between the two streams, is the oldest incor- 
porated town in the State, was the seat of the Colonial Government before the 




The Ruins of the old Church at Jamestown, Virginia. 



622 



WILLIAMSBURG AND ITS PAST. 



Revolution, and the capital of the Dominion until 1779. On the lawn in front of 
William and Mary College, the oldest of American educational institutions 
except Harvard, stands the statue of Lord Botetourt, who ruled over the Vir- 
ginians some years previous to the troubles between the mother country and the 
colonies, and who died two years before the advent of the great Revolution. 

The tide of war has from time to time swept 
round the College buildings, but has always 
respected the old statue. The Virginians of 
revolutionary days did not bring the good 
Lord down from his pedestal, for he had been 
a faithful Governor, zealous and never forget- 
ful of their interests. The marble image, 
however, once lost its head, a college student, 
who afterward became Governor of Virginia, 
having taken a fancy to knock it off; but it 
was carefully replaced. William and Mary 
College has had the rare honor of educating 
several Presidents of the United States. 
During the late civil war it suffered much, 
and to-day stands in serious need of finan- 
cial aid. 

A century ago a noble avenue, known as 
Gloucester street, extended from the venera- 
ble college for a mile in a straight line to 
the then Capitol of Virginia. Along its sides 

Statue of Lord Botetourt at Williamsburg, Virginia. were rangec i t he palace of the Governor, of 

which only one wing remains to-day, the rest having long since been destroyed 
by fire; the "Court-House of James City County;" the old Raleigh Tavern; the 
octagonal powder magazine which served as the colonial arsenal of Virginia, 
and from which on the night of April 20, 1775, the royal Governor stole away 
all the powder; and the old church of Bruton parish. The powder magazine 
to-day serves as the stable for the principal inn of Williamsburg. The College 
chapel, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, has vanished from the western 
extremity of the great avenue, which it once adorned. Old Bruton Church, 
standing midway between the College and the site of the ancient Capitol, was 
erected shortly after the noted James Blair, commissary to the Bishop of Lon- 
don, and President of William and Mary College, became minister, when Spots- 
wood was Governor in 17 10. Whitfield often preached in the church, and the 
parish became noted as the ground on which, more than sixty years before the 
outbreak of the American Revolution, the battle of the rights of the people 
against privilege and irresponsible authority was fought. The Rev. Mr. Blair 
had a hearty quarrel with Spotswood, the Governor insisting upon the right 
of choosing parish clergymen, while Blair contended for the right of the vestries 
to make that choice. By their firm attitude the vestries at last compelled the 
Governor to yield his point. 




YORKTOWN WAR MEMORIALS. 



623 



Spotswood, although hard-headed and obstinate, was one of the ablest and 
purest of Virginia's chief magistrates in her colonial days. He it was who 
built the first iron-furnaces in the colonies, and who first rode across the great 
Blue Ridge, the barrier in his day between civilized Virginia and the wilderness 
beyond. When he and his goodly company returned to Williamsburg from their 
long and adventurous journey across the mountains, the Governor caused a 
golden horseshoe, set with precious stones, to be given to each of his fellow 
cavaliers as a badge of knighthood, bearing the motto, "Sic juvat transcendere 
monies." This was the origin of the order of the Knights of the Golden Horse- 
shoe. 

Yorktown and Williamsburg are both destined to be important termini of the 
Chesapeake and Ohio railroad. Yorktown, which lies within a few miles of the 
colonial capital, still possesses some of the picturesque and semi-decayed man- 
sions of the old Nelsons and Pages., and other noble families of Virginia. The 
traveler is yet shown the precise spot at Yorktown where, on the 19th of October, 
178 1, the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to the combined American and French 
forces took place, the remains of the intrenchments cast up by the British, on the 
south and east sides of the town, being still visible. An excavation in the bluff 
on which the village stands is called Cornwallis's Cave, and is reputed to have 
been made and used by Lord Cornwallis as a council-chamber during the siege. 
Round about both Williamsburg and Yorktown there are many newer and fresher 
memorials of war than those half-forgotten ones of the Revolution. 

A journey up the York river from Yorktown takes one past the site of the 
Indian settlement which John Smith described as " Werowocomoco," and where 
he was rescued from death by the fair Pocahontas. Not far from the site of 
this romantic rescue stands "Rose- 
well," formerly the estate of Governor 
Page, a princely edifice, whose materi- 
als were all brought over from England 
in colonial days, and which now stands 
lonely on a barren hill. On the Pa- 
munkey river is "White House," said 
to be the scene of Washington's 
marriage with Martha Custis in 1759. 
During the late war, White House was 
an important depot of supplies, and 
the fine mansion there and all the 
supplies were burned in the course of 
military operations. 

In 1584, Queen Elizabeth licensed 
Sir Walter Raleigh to search for remote 
heathen lands "not inhabited by Christian people," and granted to him in fee 
simple " all the soil within two hundred leagues of the places where his people 
should, within six years, make their dwellings or abidings," reserving only, to 
herself and her successors, his allegiance and one-fifth of all the gold and silver 




The old Colonial Powder Magazine at Williamsburg, Virginia. 



624 



raleigh's colonial schemes 




The old Church of Bruton Parish —Williamsburg, Virginia. [Page 622.] 



he should obtain. Sir Walter at once sent out two ships, which visited Wococan 
Island, in North Carolina, and the next year he dispatched seven ships, with 107 
men, who settled on Roanoke Island. The Indians there soon acknowledged 

themselves the homagers 
of the brave Sir Walter, 
and in 1586 and 1587 he 
sent a Governor, with twelve 
assistants and a charter 
of incorporation, instruct- 
ing them to settle on Ches- 
apeake Bay. They landed, 
however, at "Hattorask," 
now known as Hatteras. 
In 1588, when a fleet was 
ready to sail with a new 
supply of colonists and 
supplies, it was detained 
in English ports by Queen 
Elizabeth to assist against 
the Spanish Armada; and 
Sir Walter, who had ex- 
pended ,£40,000 in these 
enterprises, was obliged to get others to adventure their money. In 1589, he 
therefore 'deeded to other colonists the liberty of trade to his new country free 
from all taxes for seven years, excepting the fifth part of the gold and silver ore 
due the Queen. At different times % vt ,^,:< s^ ft ft ' 

thereafter, however, he sent off fresh • -. ' .'.'"■[■ „.,'"'.. 

expeditions to the American coast, ^ -\ ' "°. v - \ , 

but the fate of the last colonists sent ^ ' x ... '" ^"f 

hither was never known, and Sir '" .'■';... : - ■' 

Walter died on the scaffold without 
seeing the realization of his bright 
dreams of a new empire on the Amer- 
ican Continent. 

Those who supposed that Raleigh's 
grant was forfeited by his alleged 
treason petitioned King James, the 
successor of Elizabeth, for a new grant 
of Virginia to them. It was executed 
to Sir Thomas Gates and others, and 
in 1607 a settlement was effected at 
Jamestown, on the river James. This grant " was superseded by letters patent 
of the same King in 1609 to the Earl of Salisbury and others, incorporating them 
by the name of 'The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of 
the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia ; ' granting to them and 




Cornwallis's Cave, near Yorktown, Virginia. [Page 623.] 



ENGLISH IMPOSITIONS UPON VIRGINIA. 625 

their successors all the lands in Virginia from Point Comfort along the sea- 
coast to the northward two hundred miles, and from the same point along the 
sea-coast to the southward two hundred miles, and all the space from this pre-, 
cinct on the sea-coast up into the land, west and north-west, from sea to sea, to- 
gether with the islands within ioo miles of it." This grant was added to in 1612. 

In 162 1 this Company established two Supreme Councils in Virginia, one 
called "The Council of State," the other "The General Assembly," to be 
convened by the Governor once yearly or oftener, the latter body to consist 
of the Council of State and two burgesses out of every town, hundred, or 
plantation, to be chosen by the inhabitants. In due time King James and 
" The Company of Adventurers " quarreled, and the latter's powers were 
superseded by a proclamation in 1624. As Charles I. then took the govern- 
ment of England, the colonists of Virginia passed under his control, and in this 
they heartily accorded, loving and admiring the cavalier King. 

But presently the northern parts of their colony were granted away to Lords 
Baltimore and Fairfax, the first of whom also obtained the rights of separate 
jurisdiction and government. After the deposition of Charles I., the English 
Parliament, standing in the deposed King's stead, began to tyrannize over the 
colony and to impose grievous restrictions upon it. But the Virginian colonists 
had, from the first, maintained a vigorous opposition to. Cromwell and the Parlia- 
ment, and did not lay down their arms until, as they fancied, they had secured 
their rights by a solemn covenant with the deputies from Parliament. These 
rights, which, with arms in their hands, they sternly insisted upon, were that 
Virginia's ancient limits should be restored to her ; that the colony should be 
freed from all taxes and impositions ; that the colonists should have all the rights 
of free-born Britons ; that the Assembly should convene as formerly, and that 
trade should be free. Every one of these rights, so strongly insisted upon, was 
subsequently violated by English kings and parliaments. "The General Assem- 
bly was split into two houses ; appeals from their Supreme Court, which had 
been fixed by law in that Assembly, were arbitrarily revoked to England, to be 
there heard before the King and Council."* The colony saw its sea-coast re- 
duced in thirty years from 400 to 100 miles; its foreign trade was suppressed; 
and the gradual restriction and oppression practised by England, under the long 
line of royal governors, and the intolerable grants of land made to the detriment 
of the colonists after the Restoration, finally resulted in the Virginia phase of the 
revolution which became so general throughout America. England lost a proud 
domain when the Virginians were alienated from her. The State which pro- 
duced Marshall, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Nicholas, Henry, Randolph, Lee, 
Pendleton, Washington, Wythe, and other members of the Convention which 
assembled in Richmond in June, 1788, to ratify the Federal Constitution, deserved 
deference and generous treatment rather than oppression and abuse. Time was 
when England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia had their arms quartered on the 
same shield. 

* Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia." 



RICHMOND — ITS TRADE AND CHARACTER. 

THE view of the Virginian capital as one approaches it on the James river, is 
singularly fine. One gains the impression that Richmond is an immense 
metropolis, the hills seem so packed with streets lined on either side with solid 
blocks of stone and brick. From the ample foliage peep church-spires and 
towers, and the roofs of spacious mansions are seen on Cary, Main, Franklin, 
Grace, Marshall, Clay and Leigh streets, and in the pretty suburbs of " Chim- 







View of Richmond, Virginia, from the Manchester side of the James River. 

borazo" and Union, Church and Navy, Gamble's and Libby's Hills. The 
splendid steamers of the Old Dominion Company, which controls the line between 
New York and Richmond, ply slowly along the stream through the level plains 
bordered with forests, and give one ample time to study the city which was so 
lately the Confederate capital. Its grouping of houses and streets, seen at a 
distance, is picturesque ; as one approaches it the ordinary aspects of an Ameri- 
can city appear in their customary prosaic form. 

One is not sorry to see hills again, after the lowlands of the serpentine James, 
and he climbs with gusto the steep streets leading to the Capitol, whence he can 
get a look over the broad plains beyond the stream. A few years ago the 
dwellers in Richmond watched those plains with keenest anxiety, when cannon 
thundered and battles were fought in the forests and along the roads. The 
traveler remembers that he saw many church-spires in the vicinity of the Capitol 



THE PANORAMA OF RICHMOND SHOCKOE HILL. 



627 




as he looked at the city from the river ; from Capitol Square he can hardly 
distinguish them, they are so concealed, save their very tops, by the ample foliage. 
From the front porch he can look down upon the James, flowing hurriedly 
through the city over a rocky bed which makes Richmond the head of naviga- 
tion; and can note the barges clustered about the flour- mills, and the groups of 
negroes at the doors of the tobacco warehouses. The State Penitentiary's white- 
washed walls, on a neighboring hill, 
form a group as picturesque as an 
Italian monastery. On the Richmond 
bank of the river the immense array 
of shops, known as the Tredegar Iron 
Works, lies half- concealed beneath 
clouds of smoke, and beyond them are 
the " Old Dominion Nail Works," on 
the famous " Belle Isle," where Fed- 
eral prisoners were confined during 
the war. Manchester, on the oppo- 
site side of the stream, is a thriving 

Village, With tWO fine COttOn-mills Libby Prison -Richmond, Virginia. 

employing three hundred workers, and with many neat houses, which testify to the 
prosperity of the villagers. Farther down the James, one can see the unsightly 
group of buildings around the low, dirty- looking, ancient edifice, known as 
" Libby Prison." Not far away, on the opposite side of the street, is the famous 
"Castle Thunder." These once noted prisons, whose walls are covered with the 
names of the hapless Union officers who sweltered and starved in them during 
the civil war, have been relegated to their previous condition of tobacco ware- 
houses. 

At the foot of the hill occupied by Capitol Square stands the pretty Custom- 
House, built in the Italian style from the granite of which inexhaustible beds lie 
all around Richmond. From the Square, avenues running down toward the river 
open into Main street, a broad business thoroughfare, extending along the hills 
and into the valleys, and lined with the principal shops, banks and offices of the 
town. Below Main, on all the streets by the river-side, are located the wholesale 
establishments, the manufactories, and the warehouses. A vacant spot here and 
there, blackened by fire, is the only reminder of the great conflagration which 
ran riot for a mile through the business section of the city on the night when the 
Confederates were forced to evacuate the capital which they had defended so 
long and so well. Richmond lost a thousand buildings in that fire ; but now 
builds half as many every year. In 1873, the city expended a million and a- 
half dollars in the erection of new edifices. 

" Shockoe Hill," on which the Capitol stands, is a goodly eminence. Its 
picturesque height was so attractive to the eyes of old Colonel Byrd, of West- 
over, in 1733, that he decided to lay the " foundation of a large city there." He 
had found a promising site for another metropolis at the falls of the Appomattox 
river, where Petersburg stands, and recorded in his diary that Richmond and 



628 



THE CAPITOL — STATUE OF WASHINGTON, 



Petersburg, being the uppermost landings of James and Appomattox rivers, 
" were naturally intended for marts where the traffic of the outer inhabitants 
must centre." The good Colonel's judgment has been proved accurate. 
" Shockoe's " height was once furrowed by deep ravines on either side, and 
weeds nourished where now dainty flower-beds and trim lawns delight the eye. 
The modest three-story wooden house in which Henry and Jefferson, when 
Governors of Virginia, lived, has been succeeded by a handsome " Executive 
Mansion." The Capitol itself, modeled, according to Thomas Jefferson's sug- 
gestion, after the celebrated Maison Carre at Nismes, in France, has an imposing 
front, but is insecure and insufficient for the uses of a great commonwealth. A 
horrible accident occurred in the building in April of 1870, by which over fifty 








.... : 



we! 



llffiKfafei 



Capitol Square, with" a view of the Washington Monument— Richmond, Virginia. 

people were killed and hundreds were wounded. The flooring of the room 
situated directly above the Hall of the House of Delegates, and used as the 
Court of Appeals, gave way, and precipitated a large audience, gathered to hear 
the decision of an important case, into the legislative chamber. 

The Capitol contains the celebrated statue of Washington, by Houdon, made 
in 1788, and erected in the same year by the grateful State, which would not 
wait until its hero was dead before it deigned to honor his deeds. In the square 
" hall of entrance," where this statue stands, there are also a marble bust of 
Lafayette, and an antique English stove, used to warm the House of Burgesses 
at Williamsburg in colonial days. The stove is three stories high, and when 



THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT HISTORIC CHURCHES. 



629 



sent to the Colonies its founder, Buzaglo, wrote concerning it : " The elegance 
of the workmanship does honor to Great Britain. It excels in grandeur any- 
thing ever seen of the kind, and is a masterpiece not to be equaled in all 
Europe." It was given to the House of Burgesses by the Duke of Beaufort, 
and is the most interesting of colonial memorials, except the chair in which the 
Speaker of the House of Burgesses once sat, and which is now in the Capitol. 
A fine portrait of General Lee, by Elder, graces the Hall of Delegates. The 
only bronze statue which Richmond possesses is the most 'remarkable in the 
United States. It is the equestrian statue of Washington, upon which Crawford 
lavished so much labor, and in which his splendid genius shines more con- 
spicuously than in any other of his works. The statue, completed by Randolph 
Rogers, stands on the esplanade leading from the Governor's house to the west 
gate of the Capitol Square. Around the colossal Washington, mounted on 
a finely modeled horse, which seems vaulting airily from a massive pedestal of 
granite, stand bronze figures of Patrick Henry; Thomas Jefferson; John Mar- 
shall, one of the bravest fighters in the Revolution, as well as a most illustrious 
Chief-Justice of the United States ; Andrew Lewis, one of the giants who sup- 
ported Washington in the earliest struggles against Great Britain ; George 
Mason, author of the Virginia "Bill of Rights;" and Thomas Nelson, a Governor 
of the old commonwealth 
during the Revolution and a 
brilliant soldier. Around the 
lower pediments military and 
civic decorations are em- 
blazoned in bronze. The 
Capitol Square also contains 
a marble statue of Henry 
Clay. Northward from the 
square is the City Hall, and 
not far from it the stately 
mansion which Jefferson 
Davis chose for his residence 
when Richmond was the 
Confederate capital. Near at 
hand is St. Paul's Church, in 
which Davis was seated at 
worship when the messenger 
brought him the fatal news 
of the final disaster to Lee's 
army, and the necessity of 
flight from Richmond. 

There are three churches 
in the Virginian capital which possess especial interest for the traveler. One of 
them, St. John's, dates from before the Revolution, and is celebrated as the 
edifice in which Patrick Henry uttered his immortal words — "Give me liberty 




Si- John's Church — Richmond, Virginia. 



630 



THE OLD AFRICAN CHURCH HOLLYWOOD. 



or give me death ! " Modern improvements are crowding thickly around this 
venerable structure, which was also filled, long after the Revolution had been 
successful, by the delegates that Virginia sent up to Richmond to ratify the 
Federal Constitution. The second church is a long, low building on steep Broad 




Hr^fe 



y^0r^^y^3^>^^^. 



View on the James River, Richmond, Virginia. 

street. It is known as the "Old Afri- 
can," and is crowded on Sundays with 
the dusky population of the negro 

quarters. During the late war, and the troublous times following it, this humble 
but spacious building was the scene of many tumultuous political gatherings. 
Now-a-days the white visitor, unobtrusively seating himself in one of the rear 
pews, can look over a vast congregation of blacks listening with tearful and 
rapt attention to the emotional discourse of their preacher, or singing wild 
hymns, as they are read out, line by line, by the deacon. The singing is one of 
the most remarkable features in all the African churches in Richmond ; every one 
joins in it, and it is not uncommon to see the churches so crowded that the 
doors are blockaded, the worshipers obstructing even the sidewalks, as they 
unite with enthusiasm in the simple yet really beautiful service. 

The third noticeable church is the Monumental, built on the spot on Broad 
street where, in 1811, the Richmond Theatre took fire during an evening per- 
formance, and a great number of the most beautiful women and eminent men 
in the State, including the Governor and other personages of distinction, were 
burned and crushed to death. 

Richmond's principal cemetery, Hollywood, has long been noted as one of 
the most lovely in the South. It occupies a wide tract in the western limits 
of the city, picturesquely broken into hill and dale, and decorated with prettiest 
of shrubs and flowers. From a slope in the cemetery one gets a fine outlook 
over the winding James river and Kanawha Valley canal; on the fretted cur- 
rent of the James river itself, with its waterfalls and clusters of green islets; and 
on the northern and eastern hills of the city, covered with masses of well- 
grouped buildings and remnants of fortifications. In the southern section of 
the cemetery stands the tomb of President Monroe, whose remains were 
escorted to Richmond from New York by the Seventh Regiment several years 
before that noted organization had any idea that it would ever make a hostile 
incursion into the "Old Dominion." From the hill one can see the ruins of 



THE CONFEDERATE DEAD RICHMOND S TRADE. 



63I 



the old State Armory near the canal. The Confederates used it during the 
war, and when the evacuation of Richmond was ordered, the Armory was 

swept away in the conflagration 




Monument to the Confederate Dead — Richmond, Virginia. 



kindled by the retreating army. 

In the soldiers' section are the 
graves of hundreds of Confederate 
dead, and from the centre of this tract 
springs a rough stone pyramid, which 
the clinging ivy is gradually clothing 
in green. Soldiers from all. the 
Southern States are buried under the 
shadow of this pyramid, and late in 
the month of May, a few days before 
the North observes the ceremonies of 
Decoration, the gray- coated veterans 
and the militia regiments parade in solemn procession to the cemetery, and 
thousands of ladies dressed in black wander silently and tearfully among the 
graves. There are rarely any speeches ; there is no display of flags and em- 
blems of the lost cause ; the grief is too deep for words, too sacred to be asso- 
ciated with the vulgar details of politics. 

Richmond is chief among Virginia cities, no less because of its proud posi- 
tion as the capital than because of its enterprise and its rapid growth. It now 
has nearly fifty-five thousand inhabitants, and its population is steadily increas- 
ing. The total assessed 
value of its real estate and 
personal property amounts to 
$37,000,000. Its exports 
amounted in the year 1873 
to $3,026,492, an increase in 
one year of $1,026,123; its 
trade with other countries, to 
which it sends wheat, flour, 
leaf and manufactured tobacco, 
resin, lard, stoves, and furni- 
ture, is steadily increasing. 
The aggregate product of the 
manufactories in the city in 
1872 was $16,199,870. The 
most important and oldest in- 
dustries of the town are the 
manufacture of chewing to- 
bacco and the milling of flour. 
The Gallego flour-mill, which produces fifteen hundred barrels daily, has a 
monopoly of the Rio de Janeiro and Australian trade, where the Richmond 
flour is preferred to all others, because it suffers no injury from transportation 




The Gallego Flouring - Mill — Richmond, Virginia. 



632 



THE FLOUR AND TOBACCO TRADE, 



through the hot latitudes near the equator. From " Rockitt's," the "port" of 
Richmond, on the James, thousands of barrels of flour are weekly carried away 
in small sailing vessels, which ply constantly between Brazil and Virginia, bring- 
ing coffee on their trips to America. Richmond was, up to i860, the third 
coffee mart in the United States, and will perhaps be the first when her Western 
connections have been so perfected that wheat enough to supply the hoppers 
of the flour-mills can be obtained, and the commerce with South America 




Wfm 



*in.ilV% 



assumes the mammoth proportions it 
promises some day to take. The city 
suffered the loss of one of its largest 
flour-mills by fire a year since ; but 
the citizens propose speedily to re- 
place it by another and ampler one. The present Gallego mill has twice arisen 
from the ruins caused by conflagrations. This mill was owned successively by 
Mr. Gallego and Mr. Chevallie, both accomplished Frenchmen, the latter being 
especially distinguished for his literary culture and his courtly manners. 

The tobacco trade of Richmond has long been of great importance to the 
city, and is one of the mainstays of its commerce. The trade is by no means 
as large as it was before the war, when slave labor made a mammoth production 



GOSSIP ABOUT TOBACCO. 



633 



more certain aian now, and when there was no revenue officer with vigilant eyes 
in every town. There are at present in Richmond about forty-five tobacco fac- 




Tobacco Culture — Stringing the Primings. 

tories in operation, each employing from fifty to two hundred hands, and each 
producing from fifteen hundred to twenty thousand pounds of manufactured to- 
bacco daily. The revenue which this article pays to the General Government is 
enormous. The collections of internal revenue for the year 1872 in the Rich- 
mond district of Virginia averaged a quarter of a million dollars monthly ; and 
during the year amounted to more than three million dollars. While the reve- 
nue collected from the tax on 
ardent spirits in the Rich- 
mond district in 1 873 was but 
$34,476, that on tobacco was 
$3,064,293, many hundred 
times more than the amounts 
collected there by the General 
Government from all other 
sources. The collections in 
that district from the various 
taxable articles since May r, 
1869, amount to $12,251,537. 
When the tobacco comes 
from the plantations through- 
out Virginia and North Caro- 
lina tO the Richmond market, A Tobacco Barn in Virginia. 

it is first taken to some of the great warehouses on the border of the James, 
where it remains until the commission merchants to whom it is consigned desire 




634 



INSPECTION AND SALE OF TOBACCO. 



to dispose of it. It is then " sampled" by a sworn State Inspector, who is 
responsible for the quality of each package from which he takes a sample. The 
"samples" are carried to the "Tobacco Exchange," where they are exposed 
for sale, either to private parties or at public auction. There are annually 
inspected in the Richmond warehouses from 40,000 to 45,000 hogsheads, or 
more than three-fourths of the entire crop of the State. The finest grades of 
tobacco come from Halifax and Charlotte counties in Virginia, and from Gran- 
ville and Caswell counties in North Carolina. The tobacco leaf is the most 
troublesome as well as the most remunerative staple which the Virginian 
planter can raise. The old ex-slaveholders are wont to moan bitterly over the 




The Old Method of Getting Tobacco to Market. 

,oss of the good old days when there were from six hundred to a thousand slaves 
upon a tobacco plantation, and when the lands were taxed almost beyond the 
limits of their strength that the greatest possible results might be secured. But 
now-a-days the work that previous to 1 860 was done on one plantation is divided 
between a hundred "landed proprietors." * 

The Richmond dealers cluster daily around the Tobacco Exchange, where 
they find an epitome of the whole tobacco production of the State neatly 
arranged in samples. Hundreds of negroes toil in the warehouses, as in Lynch- 
burg and Petersburg, opening the hogsheads for the inspectors, and arranging the 

* In 1873 there were inspected in Richmond 42,054 hogsheads, 8,201 tierces, and 1,218 
boxes, besides 2,834,100 pounds of loose tobacco. The latter is mainly grown within a radius 
of forty miles from Richmond, and is brought to market in wagons. The Tobacco Exchange, 
started as a private speculation in 1857 by William Y. Sheppard, Esq., has now passed into the 
hands of the tobacco trade. 



THE WATER POWER OF RICHMOND. 



635 



lots. Half a century ago the tobacco warehouses in Richmond were mere 
wooden sheds ; the cask containing the weed was rolled to these warehouses 
on its own periphery. The rough farmers who had spent a whole season in cul- 
tivating a crop packed it tightly into a cask, then drove a long wooden spike into 
the centre of each end of the compressed mass. This served as an axletree ; a 
split sapling was transformed into a pair of shafts, rude tires were placed* around 
each end of the cask, and a stout horse and a steer trundled this extempore 
wagon to the capital, where its contents were inspected, and then sold. Near 
each warehouse stood a furnace, into which all tobacco unfit for exportation 
was thrown to be burned. 

The water power of Richmond is not quite so limitless as an enthusiastic 
Virginian once declared it, viz. : " Sufficient to run all the machinery in the 
New England States;" but the best authorities have pronounced the available 
power very large, certainly much ampler than the entire mill privileges combined 
of Lowell and Lawrence in Massachusetts. There is enough for three or four 
times as many manufactories as are now established along the James at Rich- 
mond and Manchester, and within a short distance of this power ships drawing 
thirteen feet of water can come £t all seasons of the year. The prominent 
citizens of Richmond are anxious for the establishment of more cotton-mills on 
the James ; and it is- possible that in future the Virginia capital will become 
the rival of Fall River and Lowell. The present ratio of increase in the 
value of products manufactured in the city is certainly as rapid as could be 




Getting a Tobacco Hogshead Ready for Market. 



expected after the trials undergone by Virginia during the last decade. The 
tobacco factories, the iron works, and the flour-mills showed a product amount- 
ing to twelve million dollars in 1873; and the manufacturers of agricultural 
41 



636 



AN IMPORTANT CENTRE FOR MANUFACTURES. 



implements, of fertilizers, the preparers of sumac, the makers of clothing 
paper, and a hundred miscellaneous articles, are all prosperous and active. 
The receipts of corn, of wheat, of coal and iron are increasing immensely 
from year to year as the Western railroad connections are perfected and the 

mineral deposits in the 
mountains are unearth- 
ed. * The Tredegar Iron 
Works now employs a 
million dollars capital 
and two thousand work- 
men ; its buildings cover 
fifteen acres, and it an- 
nually works up tens of 
thousands of tons of 
crude iron. 

There seems but little 
doubt that Richmond 
will become one of the 
most important Southern 
centres of iron manufac- 
ture. Now that the Vir- 
ginian has learned to as- 
pire to something besides 
"land and negroes," and 
that new railroads enable 
him to utilize the im- 
mense coal and iron de- 
posits of the common- 
wealth, it is reasonable to believe that he will improve his opportunities, and will 
make of the pretty capital on the James one of the most prosperous of manufac- 
turing towns. The Richmond, Piedmont, Dan River, and New River coal-fields 
will add their stores to those of the mighty Kanawha valley; and the iron region 

* Leading articles brought into Richmond during three fiscal years, ending September 30th. 
of each year: l8?u l872- 

Coal, tons 31,220 59, 188 




Scene on a Tobacco Plantation — Finding Tobacco-Worms. 



7,824 
1,901 

i,744 
7,8i7 



Corn, bushels 

Fish, barrels 

Guano, tons 

Hay, bales 

Ice, tons 

Iron, tons 

Lime, barrels 28,834 

Lumber, feet 

Plaster, tons 

Salt, sacks 



107,456 133,696 



8,153 

5,507 ........ 

3,8i5 

8,994 

36,225 

18,389 

5,005,000 6,771,000 6,474,419 

4,916 1,903 f,208 

64,798 66,773 52,230 



1873. 

64,916 

09,225 

5,819 

13,179 
12,248 
9,101 
21,519 
17,523 



Shingles 1,272,000 2,252,000 2,353,000 

Wheat, bushels 239,213 185,383 174,355 



THE GROWTH OF RICHMOND, 



637 



liiliipsi 




which Richmond can draw upon is 
very extensive. Louisa, Spottsyl- 
vania, Albemarle, Nelson, Amherst, 
Fluvanna, Powhatan, Cumberland, 
Buckingham, Campbell and Appo- 
mattox counties possess fine depos- 
its of iron ores; and as furnaces 
spring up in those sections, the capi- 
tal will give added attention to the 
manufacture of iron. As the mineral 
development of South-eastern Mis- 
souri has aided in building up St. 
Louis, so will the unearthing of the 
treasures in that part of Virginia 
tributary to Richmond give that city 
added strength and size. The re- 
sources of the hematite beds of 
Augusta, Rockbridge, Bath and Al- 
leghany counties, can be readily 
united at Richmond with those of 
the Kanawha coal-seams. It is safe 
to predict that in a generation the 
whole character of the city will be 
changed ; that it will have become a 
sprightly centre, devoted to manu- 
factures, and filled with huge estab- 
lishments for turning raw cotton, 
crude tobacco, and pig-iron into 
serviceable articles. In twenty years 
manufacturers will be the aristocrats 
in Virginia. What planter of the 
Old Dominion twenty years ago 
would have believed such a thing 
possible ? 

The rapid growth of Richmond 
doubtless carries sadness to the heart 
of the Virginian of the old school. 
For in the steady progress of the 
capital toward prominence as a 
manufacturing centre he sees the 
symbol of the decay of the society 
which produced him and his. He 
hates large cities, with their demo- 
cratic tendencies, their corruption, 
and their ambitious populations. He 



638 RICHMOND SCHOOLS. 

looks upon the rich manufacturer as a parvenu ; the lordly agriculturist is still, 
in his mind, the only fitting type of the real aristocrat. He shudders when 
he sees the youth of the new school engaging in commerce, buying and selling 
mines, talking of opening new railroad routes, and building cotton-mills. He 
flies to the farthest corner of the lands that have been spared to him out of the 
wrecks caused by the war, and strives to forget the present, and to live as 
he did "before the surrender," like a country squire in England two hundred 
years ago. 

Richmond, in the conduct of her schools, does not belie the reputation for 
advanced progress in education which Virginia has gained. In April of 1869 
her citizens of all parties petitioned the City Council for a system of public 
schools, and in due time a school ordinance was adopted, and a Board of Educa- 
tion was appointed. To the insufficient appropriation made by the city authori- 
ties, generous donations from the Peabody fund, the Freedmen's Bureau fund, 
and Northern educational societies, were added, and fifty-two schools, with a 
pupil membership of twenty-four hundred, were opened. At the close of this 
first session the citizens voluntarily agreed to continue the schools, and the city 
took control of those for black and white alike. In the season of 1870-71, the 
attendance had increased to 3,300, and the schools of the city were finally made 
a part of the State system. The School Board turned the Davis Mansion, once 
the " White House " of the Confederacy, into a school building. 

The Richmond schools for both white and colored pupils rank among the 
best in the country. The schools are grouped in houses holding six hundred 
pupils each, and are divided into six grades of primary and four of grammar, 
with an advanced high school grade. No Virginian living in Richmond is able 
to say that his children cannot receive as good an education in the public as they 
can obtain in private schools. In 1873 Richmond had fifty-five schools for white 
and thirty-two for colored children, and expended about seventy thousand dol- 
lars in supporting them. The instruction is the same in each, and competent 
white teachers : are employed when good *black ones are lacking for the colored 
schools. No one thinks of refusing to aid the negro in obtaining his education, 
although he contributes little or nothing toward the school tax. 

The white and colored normal schools of Richmond have done noble work in 
sending out well-equipped teachers to encourage the growing sentiment in the 
State in favor of universal education and free schools. The colored normal 
school was incorporated by special act of the Virginia Legislature, and opened in 
1867. It is supported by the Freedmen's Bureau and the Peabody fund. It 
receives pupils mainly from the city public schools, and gives them a careful 
three years' course. The Richmond Institute, for the training of colored preach- 
ers and teachers, is a protege of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. 
The Baptist and the Virginia Medical Colleges, located in Richmond, are flourish- 
ing institutions ; and there are more than a score of well-conducted private 
schools, seminaries, " institutes," and academies, in which several hundred pupils 
are annually received. 



LXXI. 

THE PARTITION OF VIRGINIA — RECONSTRUCTION AND POLITICS 
IN WEST AND EAST VIRGINIA. 

AT the time of the secession of the Cotton States, Virginia was apparently- 
attached to the Union. Shortly after that secession, at an extra meeting 
of the Legislature, a State Convention was called, the members of which were 
to be elected on the 4th of February, 1861. On the 23d of January of the 
same year, a bill was passed appropriating a million dollars for .the defense of the 
State, and Virginia began to show signs of adhesion to the cause of the South. 
The Governor sent messages to the Legislature, in which hostility to the North 
and Northern institutions was exhibited. Ten Virginia members of Congress 
published an address denouncing the Republican party, and declaring that it was 
vain to expect reconciliation. Many of the delegates elected to the State Con- 
vention were conditional Union men ; some few were unconditional in their sup- 
port; but the majority avowed the doctrine of State Rights, condemned inter- 
ference with slavery, asserted the right of secession, and defined the circumstances 
under which Virginia would be justified in exercising that right. These circum- 
stances were the failure to procure such guarantees from the Northern States as 
Virginia demanded, the adoption of a war policy by the General Government, 
or the attempt to exact payment of duty, or to reinforce or capture forts. 

On the 17th of April, 1861, after the call of the President for troops, the ordi- 
nance of secession was passed by 88 to 55 votes. War measures were begun, 
and on the 25 th of April the Convention passed an act for the adoption of the 
Constitution of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States, and Vir- 
ginia was fairly out of the Union. 

In the western section of Virginia, a public meeting was held in Clarksburg, 
in Harrison county, on the 28th of April, 1861, to decide what measures should 
be taken in view of the recent action of the State. Delegates from twenty-five 
counties met at Wheeling, condemned secession, and provided for a convention 
to represent all the counties in the State favorable to a division thereof, in case 
the people of Virginia ratified the ordinance of secession, against the vote of the 
western section. The popular vote, ratifying the secession ordinance, is said to 
have given 94,000 majority for secession, Eastern Virginia voting solidly for and 
Western Virginia against it. 

On the 1 ith of June, at Wheeling, the Convention of West Virginia, represent- 
ing forty counties, passed a declaration of independence from the action of the 
State Convention, and took measures for establishing a provisional government. 
Later, the representatives of Western Virginia met as a State Legislature, and 



64O WEST VIRGINIA. 

elected Senators to the United States Congress, passed a stay law, and appro- 
priated $200,000 for carrying on the war, and the same amount to support the 
new Government. The proposition for a division of the State was voted down, 
but subsequently the Convention, at an adjourned session, passed an ordinance 
organizing the western counties into -a new State to be called " Kanawha." 
Thirty-nine counties, with a population of nearly 300,000 people, thus gave in 
their adhesion to the Union. 

On the 24th of October the Provisional Legislature, in session at Wheeling, 
sanctioned the setting off of the new State, and in October the act was approved 
by the people of thirty-nine counties by an almost unanimous vote. Western 
Virginia, as it was finally decided to call the new division, applied for admission 
to the Union at the first regular session of the 37th Congress, and on April 20th, 
1863, after the Provisional Legislature had ratified an amendment to the Constitu- 
tion, permitting free negroes to enter the State, and inserting certain provisions 
relative to freeing the slaves, Western Virginia was admitted to the Union, and 
the new State was inaugurated at Wheeling, June 20th, 1863, with imposing 
ceremonies. 

Old Virginia thus lost one of the fairest portions of her domain, an immense 
amount of material resources, a mineral region almost unequaled upon the con- 
tinent, and a large population. 

The people of Western Virginia unanimously adopted their new Constitution 
in a Convention comprising 66 Democrats and 12 Republicans, on the 9th of 
April, 1872. The Constitution guarantees West Virginia a continued separate 
existence, secures free schools, and is, withal, quite liberal, although some mem- 
bers of the Convention tried to have the negroes deprived of their newly-acquired 
right to vote. It also recognizes the obligation of West Virginia for whatever 
she may justly owe the parent State as her share in the latter's debt of $44,000,- 
000, and declares her willingness to pay it when it is properly ascertained. The 
new Constitution was ratified August 22d, 1872, by a small majority. It fixes 
the term of the office of Governor and other important State officers at four 
years, and that of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Appeals at twelve years. 
The Democrats, in 1872, nominated Johnson M. Camden, of Wood county, as 
Governor, but John J. Jacob, the then incumbent, was re-elected by a small 
majority. 

There have been at times, serious disagreements between the Governor and 
the Legislature of the State; the former interpreting the Constitution as giving 
him appointive power with regard to almost all officers, and in 1873 these disa- 
greements became the cause of quite serious. disturbances in the new common- 
wealth. The estimated expenditures of the State, under the new Constitution, 
are somewhat more than a quarter of a million of dollars yearly, to which may 
be added the . " State fund," distributed for free schools in 1873, amounting to 
about the same sum. The number of pupil-children enrolled in that year was 
170,031, of which about one-half attended school. The University of Western 
Virginia, under the exclusive control of the State, has a permanent endowment 
of $100,000. The "Normal Schools" at Fairmont, West Liberty, Shepherds- 



RECONSTRUCTION IN VIRGINIA PROPER. 64I 

town, and Marshall College are flourishing. The indebtedness of the State is very- 
slight ; taxes are not burdensome ; the State institutions are well maintained, 
and the present population, constantly increased by immigration of excellent 
character, mainly from the middle classes of England, is now nearly 500,000. 

After the division of territory, the progress of reconstruction in Virginia 
proper was marked, as in all the other States, by many political excitements and 
troubles. President Johnson's order, issued May 9, 1865, recognized Francis' H. 
Pierpont, who was originally elected Governor in West Virginia, and who had 
subsequently moved his Government seat to Alexandria, and exercised jurisdic- 
tion over a few counties adjacent to Washington during the war. His Legisla- 
ture consisted of members from ten counties, and was known to loyal men in war 
time as the "Legislature of Virginia." Governor Pierpont went to Richmond 
shortly after the surrender at Appomattox Court- House, and called a special ses- 
sion of the Legislature. 

In October, 1865, the restriction in the Constitution prescribing the oath rela- 
tive to freedom from sympathy with the late Confederacy was removed. The 
Legislature met at Richmond on the 4th day of December, 1865. 

During this year the Conservatives attempted to inaugurate a practical serf- 
dom of the freedmen, by means of vagrant laws ; and other evidences of a deter- 
mination to revert to the old system were given. But the State Government, 
which had been established by merely a handful of votes in the northern coun- 
ties, was nevertheless honestly and creditably sustained, and Governor Pierpont 
suddenly found himself in full jurisdiction over Virginia. 

In May of 1866, a "Republican State Convention" met at Alexandria, and 
a Special Committee reported a resolution declaring the so-called Legislature 
illegal and unconstitutional, and sent a memorial to Congress demanding the re- 
vocation of Governor Pierpont's powers, and asking for a " policy of reconstruc- 
tion." How far this policy had been rendered necessary by the action of the 
Conservatives with regard to the negroes, it is not necessary here to inquire. As 
soon as the Reconstruction Act of Congress had become a law, General Schofield 
was placed in command of the First Military District, which comprised the terri- 
tory of Virginia. The Conservatives, who had intended to hold a convention 
at Richmond in May of that year, and to so amend the Constitution as to 
make it coincide with the reconstruction policy of Congress, were too late to 
escape military rule. Governor Pierpont issued orders commanding all State 
officers to continue the exercise of their duties until a new election could be held 
under reconstruction. A Board of Army Officers selected the officials to super- 
intend a new registration, which was at once begun. On the 2d of April, 1867, 
an order appeared, superseding all elections under the "Provisional Government," 
until the registration should be completed. The Commanding- General at that 
time made all appointments. The Conservatives were opposed to this action, 
and the local press was violently critical. 

On the 17th of April, 1867, at the call of the "Union party of Virginia," 
a convention assembled in the African Church in Richmond, of which, out of 
two hundred and ten delegates, only fifty were white. Other political meet- 



642 THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION. 

ings were elsewhere held about the same time by freedmen and the whites 
allied with them. Many negroes sided with the Conservatives. General 
Schofield found it necessary to disband all armed organizations in the State. 
On the 3d of June orders for reconstruction were issued, and 116,982 white, 
and 104,772 colored voters were registered. In Amelia, Brunswick, Charlotte, 
Dinwiddie, Elizabeth, Halifax, Powhatan, and York counties the negroes were 
overpoweringly in the majority. 

Meantime, the Conservative wing of the Union party, so called, decided to 
hold a convention at Charlottesville on the 4th of July, 1867, but it was finally 
determined to call a " convention of all the unconditional Union men of Vir- 
ginia," to meet in the African Church in Richmond on the 1st of August, to^ 
secure the coalition of the, two wings of the Republican party of the State.. 
This convention was packed with ignorant negroes, and but little good was 
effected. 

A number of ex-officers and soldiers of the Union held a convention at 
Richmond on the 25 th of September. Vacancies in offices were filled by tem- 
porary appointees. Military commissions continued to try offenders, because 
the strong caste prejudice prevalent in the State endangered the lives and prop- 
erty of persons who sat upon mixed juries. 

On the 22d of October a Constitutional Convention was decided upon by a 
popular vote and a majority of 45,455. Of the 105 delegates chosen to this 
Convention the mass were white people. The Convention, which met on the 3d 
day of December, proposed to provide in the organic law of the State that negroes 
should be allowed equal privileges with whites in horse-cars, public , .places, &c. 
Meantime the Convention of the Conservatives of the State assembled at Rich- 
mond on the 1 2th of December. It disclaimed all hostility to the blacks, but 
hotly condemned reconstruction in toto. The Republican Constitutional Con- 
vention finally adopted an article making every male citizen 21 years old, who 
had been or might be a resident of the State for twelve months, and of a 
county, city, or town three months, a voter, excepting only those who had 
been engaged in insurrection. The test oath was brought in, and the Conserva- 
tives at once rebelled against this, as did also the commander of the military 
district, General Schofield. The operation of the test oath, inasmuch as all 
the native white Virginians had been engaged in the work of secession, would 
not have left voters enough to carry on the Government intelligently ; but the 
odious provision was not modified, and the new Constitution, with the test oath 
in it, was adopted by the Convention April 17, 1868. It had then to go before 
the people for ratification. Virginia remained, however, under military law. 

On the 4th of April of the same year, Governor Pierpont's term of office ex- 
pired. Henry H. Wells was appointed, by military authority, Governor of the 
State. Hon. Joseph Mayo, who had been Mayor of Richmond for fifteen years^ 
was removed, and George Chahoon was appointed his successor. General 
Schofield was shortly afterward made Secretary of War, and Major- General 
Stoneman took his place as Military Governor of Virginia. Things went on 
quietly thereafter until 1869. The Constitution which the Republican Conven- 



CONVENTION AT PETERSBURG — VIRGINIA'S READMISSION. 643 

tion had adopted had not yet been presented for ratification. It was evident 
that under its provisions the more intelligent and capable citizens of the com- 
monwealth were to be excluded from office. President Grant, being authorized 
to submit the Constitution to the voters of the State and to allow them to vote 
separately on the separate provisions, appointed the 6th of July as the time for 
ratification. Wells was meantime removed from the Governorship. General 
Stoneman was superseded by Major- General Canby, and the political parties 
continued an active canvass of the State. 

Shortly afterward the Republican delegates assembled in convention at 
Petersburg and renominated Mr. Wells for Governor. It was my rare fortune to 
assist at the session of this Convention, which was held in a negro church. Never 
in the history of Republicanism was there a more disgraceful and lawless rabble 
assembled together. Gratifying as it was to see those who had lately been 
slaves learning something of Government affairs, it was utterly discouraging to 
note the violent and offensive measures which they took to obtain their ends. 
Brawls, shoutings, and bickerings consumed an entire day, and the police were 
called upon four times to clear the building before a temporary president was 
chosen. 

Another wing of the Republican party of the State, which had always acted 
with the National party, but which took no part in the Petersburg Convention, 
nominated Gilbert C. Walker of Norfolk, an accomplished and amiable gentleman 
of Northern parentage, as its candidate for Governor. On the 28th of April, 
1869, the Conservatives, highly pleased with this nomination, met at Richmond, 
and favored the election of Mr. Walker, but decided to use all their efforts to vote 
down the odious Constitution which the Republicans had prepared. The Con- 
stitution was accepted, however, on the 6th of July, at a general election, by a 
majority of 197,044 votes, but the " disfranchising clause," which had been the 
cause of much of the ill feeling toward the reconstruction policy in the South, 
was voted down squarely by a majority of 39,957 votes, and the test oath 
clause was also lost by a majority of 40,992 votes. Mr. Walker was elected 
Governor, with the cooperation of the Conservatives, by a majority of 18,317 
votes. In the Legislature which then assembled there were 95 Conservatives 
and 42 Republicans, with 18 negroes in the House and 6 in the Senate. The 
Conservatives at once assumed an attitude of conciliation, and, forgetting the old 
issues and prejudices of the past, ratified the 14th and 15th amendments to the 
Constitution of the United States. The Republicans were discontented, attribut- 
ing their failure to the separate votes on the clauses of the State Constitution. 

Virginia was readmitted to the Union on the 26th of January, 1870. On 
the following day, General Canby retired from his authority; Governor Walker 
assumed his office, and for four years thereafter governed the State well and 
fairly. Had all the other Southern States been as fortunate as Virginia in escap- 
ing the major evils of reconstruction, the South would have been far more pros- 
perous than she can now hope to be for many years. 

It is noteworthy with regard to Virginia politics, that whenever the Conserv- 
ative politicians make a campaign up and down the State, sometimes flying the 



644 GOVERNOR KEMPER HIS VETO OF THE PETERSBURG BILL. 

old Confederate colors a little, they do not awaken any intense enthusiasm among 
the working population. The farmers of Virginia are too much occupied with 
their own immediate concerns to give great attention to State politics. They feel 
determined to keep the negro from attaining such power as he has gained in 
South Carolina and Louisiana ; but they are apathetic, and any attempt to organize 
them into a party of extremists would be an inevitable failure. 

The present government of the State is in good hands. The officers of the 
State Government are allied to the Conservative party, but seem determined to 
do equal and exact justice to all classes of citizens. Governor Kemper, elected 
over Mr. Hughes, the Republican candidate, in 1873, was a Confederate General, 
and is an old-school Virginian, but has a sufficient appreciation of the necessi- 
ties of the time to avoid the narrow and mean-spirited policy which has latterly 
characterized some of the other Southern States. He has thus far done every- 
thing that he could to develop good-will and confidence between the races. 
When the Legislature of the State proposed, shortly after General Kemper's 
election, to invade the liberties of the city of Petersburg and to take from it its 
self-government because the majority of the voters there were .negroes, the Gov- 
ernor stood up boldly against this movement and vetoed the bill. In his veto 
message, he said : 

" In view of the fundamental conditions on which Virginia stands as a mem- 
ber of the Federal Union ; in view of our own solemn and sworn recognition of 
the political equality before the law of all men, irrespective of race, color, or 
previous condition, the proposed measure, if enacted, could not fail to subject us 
to disastrous misconstruction at home and abroad. It would renew and intensify 
the race agitations of the past, which are being happily settled ; it would present 
Virginia to the world as being torn by intestine feuds of an apparently intermi- 
nable character ; it would discourage and postpone, if not repel, the approach of 
the immigration and capital to which our most ardent hopes are directed ; and, 
more to be deplored than all, it would sound a provocation to Federal inter- 
ference in our domestic affairs." 

In these words of Governor Kemper one may find expressed the attitude of 
the better class of Virginian Conservatives. The determination to avoid every- 
thing which might be construed as ungenerous toward the negro ; to build up 
his character by education, and to urge him to accumulate property; the gradual 
change and softening of public sentiment among the elder aristocrats with regard 
to the introduction of manufactures and the dignity of labor, — all point to a 
change in the character of the Old Dominion, which will result in making her one 
day as rich and mighty as Pennsylvania or Missouri. 

The aggregate of assessed values of taxable property of all kinds in Virginia, 
in 1873, was not quite $337,000,000. In i860 the assessed value of the real 
and personal property actually subjected to taxation in the State was $585,099,- 
382, and the official reports show that property of the value of $163,556,100 was 
then exempted from taxation, thus making the actual aggregate resources of the 
State in that year about $748,000,000. The aggregate value of real and personal 
property within the 38,348 square miles in the present limits of Virginia proper, 



POPULATION OF THE STATE FUNDING ACT. 645 

in i860, was $632,000,000. It will be seen from these figures that the decline in 
taxable values has been very great and rapid. The losses in production have in 
some cases been startling, as instanced in that of tobacco, the crop of which in 
i860 amounted to 123,968,312 pounds, but in 1870 to only 37,086,364. The 
decrease in production is largely due to the fact that the slave population, which 
constituted the most valuable producing class before the war, numbering more 
than half a million persons, now produces little but a bare living for itself. Until 
the Virginian negroes learn to be enterprising and industrious, and to produce 
surplus crops, the cultivation of the great staples in the State will languish. 

Of the 1,125,163 inhabitants of Virginia, more than 512,000 are blacks. It 
would seem that both whites and colored people spend even the small amount of 
ready money which they have upon things which do not profit their souls ; for 
General Ruffner, the able State Superintendent of Public Instruction, asserts that 
the consumption of liquors in Virginia amounts to something like $19,000,000 
annually. During the fiscal year 1872, the revenue officers of the United States 
collected from liquor dealers in Virginia $71,000 in licenses. General Ruffner is 
probably very nearly right when he puts the cost of the liquor yearly drank as 
a beverage in the State at $12,000,000, and he shows the folly and criminality of 
the general indulgence in whiskey, by stating that the gross annual product of 
seven of the best counties in the State is not sufficient to pay for the liquor con- 
sumed by the people of the commonwealth ; that the gross production of nearly 
half the small counties would not compensate for annual loss by drink ; that the 
Virginians drink up the value of their wheat crop, every year; and that the legis- 
lative cost and the expenses of courts and civil officers and State institutions and 
the public free schools, and the interest on the enormous public debt, only amount 
to a little more than one-quarter of the sum which the people of Virginia yearly 
spend upo'n liquor. Colonel Burwell, of Richmond, estimates the annual con- 
sumption of liquor in Virginia at 2,500,000 gallons, and he latterly introduced 
a bill into the Legislature, imposing a tax of 30 cents per gallon upon this liquor, 
which would, if collected, yield the State a revenue of $750,000. But this bill 
has not yet become a law. 

The State is now seriously considering the sources from which it may derive 
increased revenue, but doubts the expediency of increasing the taxation upon 
lands, as it would result in a virtual confiscation of private property. The State 
credit is severely prostrated ; for, while the debt is enormous, considering the 
present condition of the commonwealth, the interest is largely in arrears. The 
act known as the Funding act pledged the State to the regular and punctual 
payment of interest on the debt, which it provided to be newly funded in the 
name of Virginia ; but the State was unable to fulfill these obligations, and 
both debtors and creditors were but poorly satisfied with the results. The 
sum then funded, the interest upon which is largely overdue, was $30,478,741.48, 
excluding the amount assigned for settlement with West Virginia. The reve- 
nues of the State, as compared with her available resources, are quite large ; yet 
they are usually less than enough to support the Government and to pay full 
interest on the debt. The Conservatives will "take care to do nothing tending 



646 



SENTIMENT IN FAVOR OF FREE EDUCATION. 



to impair the public credit. No partial or total repudiation will ever be consid- 
ered, and the impolicy of taxing capital heavily is thoroughly understood. 
Virginia will not fail to treat liberally all capital invested in the establishment of 
new manufactures within her boundaries. 

The favorable advance in public sentiment regarding general free education 
in Virginia grows more noticeable yearly. It is largely due to the energetic 
campaign upon which General Ruffner, the State Superintendent of Education, 
entered under the Administration of Governor Walker. By able reports, lec- 
tures, figures, and liberal as well as daring policy, he has revolutionized opinion 
in many parts of the State. The organization of the graded schools is rapidly 
becoming general in thickly-populated localities, and 160,859 pupils were in 
1873 enrolled upon the books of the public schools. The total cost to the 
public fund for education was $707,835, and the total cost to all sources nearly 
$800,000, of which the Peabody fund contributed $31,450. There were 2,070 
students in the various universities and colleges of the State, 1,207 of whom 
were native Virginians. 




■^s 



A Water-melon Wagon. 



LXXII. 



FROM RICHMOND TO CHARLOTTESVILLE. 

RICHMOND is well supplied with railroads. The Richmond, Fredericksburg 
and Virginia road extends northward to Alexandria, the Potomac, and 
Washington ; the Richmond and Petersburg road southward to Petersburg ; 
south-eastward runs the rail route connecting the capital with Yorktown ; south- 
westward the road to Danville, and thence to Greensboro' in North Carolina, 
and westward the Chesapeake and Ohio. By the York River railway route one 
may reach the battle-fields of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks, only four miles away. 




A Marl -Bed on the Line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. 

The Chesapeake and Ohio railroad at present extends from Richmond 
through the Piedmont country, the Blue Ridge, and the Alleghanies, to Hun- 
tington on the Ohio river. It was formed by a consolidation of the roads, 
properties and franchises of the Virginia Central and the Covington and Ohio 
railroad companies. Its charter privileges cover the line from tide-water on the 
James to the Ohio river, at or near the mouth of the Big Sandy, where the 
borders of the States of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio touch each other. 
This is a distance of 427 miles. Several important branches and extensions are 
contemplated. One is a line from Richmond down the peninsula, between the 
York and James rivers, to a point on the deep waters of the Chesapeake 
bay, near the Capes. They further propose to give Richmond its long de- 
sired direct communication with the West by the completion of the Elizabeth- 
town, Lexington and Big Sandy railroad in Kentucky to Huntington. At 
Lexington this will connect with Louisville, Cincinnati and Lexington, one of 



THE CHICKAHOMINY HANOVER COURT-HOUSE. 

the oldest roads in Kentucky, and there will then be a direct all-rail line 640 
miles in length, between Richmond and Louisville. The road from Richmond 
to the Ohio river was opened for traffic on the 1st of April, 1873. This great 
central highway crosses both the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany mountains by 
easy grades, the highest elevation attained being about two thousand feet. It 
offers special advantages for the transportation of the surplus productions of the 




. 



Earthworks on the Chickahominy, near Richmond, Virginia. 

West directly to the largest, deepest, and most secure harbor on the eastern 
Atlantic coast of the United States. Along the greater portion of the route 
the best coals abound, in thick seams, close to and above the level of its track; 
and this coal can be supplied to its locomotives at the bare cost of handling. 
As it lies near the 38th parallel of latitude, it is never liable to obstruction from 
deep snows, nor interruption from severe frosts. 

The journey from Richmond to the Piedmont country along this line of rail 
takes the traveler through little that is noteworthy. The Chickahominy river, 
which the railroad crosses five miles from the capital, is, at the point where the 
right wing of McClellan's army rested in June and July of 1862, an unimpressive 
stream. Various dilapidated and grass-grown earthworks are still to be seen, and 
are amicably pointed out and discussed by ex- Confederate and ex- Federal as 
the train passes. A few miles beyond are extensive marl-beds, whence Vir- 
ginia draws much of her fertilizing material ; although her planters also rely 
largely on the guano brought from the Chincha Islands for the renewal of their 
fields. 

A little farther on is Hanover Court- House, where Henry Clay was born, 
and where Patrick Henry first gave evidence of his wonderful oratorical powers, 
by his famous plea against " the parsons," who had brought an action for the 
recovery of certain amounts due them by the people. 

Here and there along the route are corn-sheds, unpretending buildings in 
which the farmers store their grain until the railway officials are ready to trans- 
port it to Richmond. 

Bending northward and westward, through the rich Hanover and Louisa 
counties, and crossing at right angles the belt of iron and gold deposits extend- 
ing through the State, Gordonsville, seventy-six miles from Richmond, is reached. 
This is an important junction. The line of road from Lynchburg to Washing- 
ton there unites with the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the trains of the two roads 



HENRICO, HANOVER, AND LOUISA COUNTIES. 



649 



run thence to Charlottesville on the same track. Gordonsville straggles along 
a rocky roaci running through a beautiful country, upon which a range of mount- 
ains looks down. There are many fine farms in the vicinity, and the English 
immigrants have done much to give the section the air of peace and homely 
thrift so marked in some British agricultural regions. The negroes, who swarm 
day and night like bees about the trains, look with amazement upon the brisk rosy 
young men and women who throng the cars, and who daily appear in increased 
numbers on all the fine farming tracts in the neighborhood. 

The three counties of Henrico, Hanover and Louisa, through which the 
Chesapeake and Ohio railroad passes' between Richmond and Gordonsville, con- 
stitute a fine specimen section of the tract in Virginia known as the " Middle 
Country," which has an area of twelve thousand square miles, and is sixty miles 




UL-^I 




Scene at a Virginia "Corn -Shed." [Page 648.] 

wide. At Gordonsville, at the South-west mountain, the surface of the country is 
about five hundred feet above sea-level. The light brown soil of the ridges and 
the rich dark brown of the bottom lands are each very productive ; and even 
the sides and summits of the mountain are arable. Tobacco, wheat, corn, flax, 
oats and sweet potatoes grow in this section abundantly and well. In the three 
counties nearly a million and a-half pounds of tobacco were produced in 1870; 
and in i860, the average production of tobacco there was 246 pounds to each 
inhabitant. The mud-beds, sometimes fifteen feet deep, furnish inexhaustible 
supplies of fertilizers ; the counties contain good grazing-lands, and large herds 
of cattle and flocks of sheep roam in the valleys. 

At Gordonsville one is at the door of the Piedmont region, which extends 
from the head of tide- water to the Blue Ridge mountains. The lower part of 
this fertile section is gently undulating ; the upper is quite hilly, but nowhere so 



650 



THE PIEDMONT SECTION. 



broken as not to admit of cultivation. The tier of counties included in this 
region comprises an area of six thousand square miles. At the outbreak of 
the war, nearly half the land in these counties had been put under culture, and 
the population of two hundred thousand persons scattered through the district 
raised annually about twenty-five million pounds of tobacco.* The lands are 
among the very finest in America ; the red, crumbling loam is easily worked, 
and from it spring noble grass, excellent grain, and delicious orchard fruits. 

The approaches to Charlottesville, the principal town of Albemarle county, 
afford a glimpse of the beauties of the Piedmont section. The mountains show 




Gordonsville, Virginia — "The negroes, who swarm day and night like bees about the trains." [Page 649.] 

their blue outlines; the slopes are dotted with rich farms; the landscape is 
radiant with peace and plenty. Before the war this county was a region of large 
plantations, principally devoted to tobacco, of which hundreds of slaves raised 
five millions of pounds annually. Now the production amounts to but little 
more than a million and a-half pounds yearly ; but it will in due time regain 
the old number ; for no section of Virginia is more rapidly recovering from the 
disorganization of labor, and the discouragements which followed upon the war, 
than Albemarle and her fertile sister counties at the foot of the Blue Ridge. 
* The whole amount of tobacco raised in Virginia in 1870 was 37,086,364 pounds. 



CHARLOTTESVILLE MONTICELLO. 



6 5 I 



English immigrants are bringing money and accurate knowledge of scientific 
farming into the country, and are prompting to a new vigor the natives who 
had begun to yield under the pressure of the adverse fortunes of the past few 
years. 

Charlottesville is one of the loveliest of Virginia towns. It has an air of 
dignified quiet which befits so ancient and distinguished a seat of learning as 
the University of Virginia, and the neighbor of such historic ground as Monti- 
cello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. The town stands on a moderate elevation, 
shut in on the south-west by hills beyond which rise the ridges known as 
the "Ragged" mountains. To the north-west one sees in the distance the 
symmetrical outlines of the Blue Ridge. On the east is the Rivanna, a pretty 
stream, although its waters are discolored by the reddish loam through which it 
flows around the base of Monticello. The railroad is an ungracious intruder, 
as locomotives saucily shriek at the very doors of sleepy taverns, and trains rattle 
through streets where everything seems to resent the outbursts of steam and the 
clang of wheels. The negro is omnipresent, the blacks appearing at first vastly 
to outnumber the white folks. Many pleasant mansions are surrounded with 
gardens embowered in shrubbery. 

A storm was muttering overhead as I climbed, one midsummer day, the steep 
road which leads from Charlottesville to Monticello. Here and there a turn in 
the route gave me exquisite glimpses of the valley below ; the old town with its 
many dingy brown houses, asleep on the plateau ; the dome of the University 
peeping above the foliage, and the delicate blue of the far-away mountains. 
Just as I was beginning to suspect that I had lost my way, I came to an ill-kept 
road branching away from the main one. Ascending this, while rain-drops clat- 
tering on my face warned me to seek shelter, 
I came suddenly upon the tomb of the author 
of the "Declaration of Independence." 

I rattled at the rusty iron gate set in the 
shabby brick wall; but, observing an enormous 
padlock, I turned away and continued the 
ascent toward the hill-top, when I noticed 
an ancient negro man in the pathway, vainly 
endeavoring to force an unruly yoke of oxen 
to obey him. The snows of eighty or ninety 
winters had frosted his wool ; the labors of 
many years of servitude had bent him double. 
He did not at first hear my salutation, but 
continued his husky appeals to the oxen. 
" Debbil in dem critturs, sho ;" then spying 
me, he took off his greasy hat with an explo- 
sive "Sah!" A sprightly negro urchin ran 
out to aid the venerable blackamoor, but seeing me, grinned good-day, and led 
the way to the house. On the right, as we approached, stood a row of negro 
cabins, from one of which a black woman came out, courtesying, and as it was at 

42 




The Tomb of Thomas Jefferson, at Monticello, 
near Charlottesville, Virginia. 



652 



THE HOME OF JEFFERSON. 




Monticello- 



-The Old Home of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration 
of American Independence. 



last raining rapidly, I entered her door. The cabin or hovel was wretched in 
the extreme ; a small window lighted a poor room, in which there was 
scarcely any furniture. On an uneven hearth a weak fire struggled with the 

dampness. On the lawn 
near the path which led, 
by a gentle ascent, to the 
mansion, was the body of 
an old infantry baggage- 
wagon, marked " U. S." 
Evidently the "late un- 
pleasantness" had pene- 
trated even to Monticello. 
The house, surrounded 
by beautiful aspen trees, 
and with its chances for an 
outlook over an ocean of 
foliage on one side, and a 
lovely valley hemmed in 
by lofty mountain ranges 
on the other, must have been a pleasant retreat in the last century. I could 
almost fancy that the long-vanished master of the estate would throw open 
the great door at which I knocked, under the lofty portico, and usher me 
into the dining-room, where I should find the Marquis de Lafayette gayly 
chatting with some country squire, or mayhap reading the memoranda for the 
" Notes on Virginia" which Mr. Jefferson prepared mainly for the instruction of 
his French friends. While I stood at the door, a sharp voice inside commanded 
various colored servants to look "yere" and there after the key, and I was pres- 
ently ushered in, not by the ghost of the great patriot, but by a sour- looking man, 
who collected a small fee before I could set foot upon the sacred threshold. He 
then proceeded to inform me that the estate was in litigation, and that it had 
"run down" very much, which indeed was quite easy to see. The interior of the 
mansion, although stripped of nearly everything placed there by Jefferson, has 
yet a few reminders left. A curious old clock stands in a corner of the entrance 
hall, and a marble bust of Jefferson himself occupies a dusty niche. The little 
dining-room with polished inlaid floor, and gilt Parisian mirrors, where the great 
man was wont to hob-nob over dinner with Lafayette, or distinguished chance 
visitors, is still in good order; the dumb waiter yet creaks solemnly in its grooves, 
and from the old-fashioned windows one can look out upon a charming lawn, and 
on leafy hill-sides. The house is a fair specimen of the commodious and not in- 
elegant structures erected in Virginia in colonial times, and when filled with 
Jefferson's superb collections of sculpture, paintings, medallions, engravings and 
books, must have been an oasis of peace to gentlemen of culture who traveled 
slowly on horseback through the Virginia woods a hundred years ago. The 
library building, separated from the house, but communicating with it by means 
of a covered passage-way, still stands. The whole is fast decaying, however, and 



THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. 



653 



if the State will not, the country should, see that the home of Jefferson is, like that 
of Washington, preserved as an historic shrine to which the lovers of liberty may 
repair for many generations to come. 

The little negro boy, carrying an immense key, bounded before me to the 
tomb, whither I went once more, despite the rain, which now came heavily. 
Entering, I found that the enclosure was a family burying-ground. Over the 
grave of the great statesman stands a simple, almost . rude granite obelisk, eight 
feet high, on which is the epitaph which he himself desired to have inscribed on 
his tomb : 

" Here Lies Buried 

Thomas Jefferson, 

Author of the Declaration of Independence : 

Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom 

And Father of the University of Virginia. - ' 

The University at Charlottesville is Jefferson's noblest monument. So long as 
it endures, the admirers of the great Virginian can afford to forego lamentation 
over the ingratitude of republics, and refrain from criticising the Government 
which is too niggardly to place a marble shaft over his grave. Jefferson founded 
the University in 18 19, and watched with tender care its early growth and im- 




The University of Virginia, at Charlottesville. 

mediate success. Always an ardent admirer of the school system prevalent in 
New England in his time, he urged Virginia to adopt it, even while she was 
struggling in the Revolution. His zeal was so great that, after persistent labor 
for many years, he succeeded in influencing the State Legislature to adopt a free- 
school system ; but its practical operation was prevented by a proviso which some 



654 THE LITERARY FUND. 

Conservative legislators managed to attach to the bill, giving the county courts, 
whose officials were unfriendly to Mr. Jefferson's plan, the privilege of declaring 
when the schools should be established in each county. 

He was not discouraged, although he saw that the commonwealth gave more 
attention to internal improvements than to the education of her people ; and he 
never forgot, even when seemingly absorbed in national politics, his schemes for 
making universal free education popular in Virginia. When, after retiring from 
the Presidency in 1809. he again took up his residence in the State, he returned 
to the work with new energy. A " literary fund " was founded by an act of 
the State Legislature in 18 10; the proceeds of this fund were designed to be 
used exclusively for the purposes of common school education. The principal 
had at one time grown to two millions of dollars ; but since the war it has yielded 
nothing. Its original nucleus* consisted of fines, forfeitures, and escheats. Mr. 
Jefferson succeeded, in 18 18, in obtaining another legislative enactment, which 
allowed an appropriation of $15,000 yearly to endow and support a university. 
A report recommending the establishment of this university, various colleges, 
and a scheme for general public education, had been made to the Legislature in 
1 8 16, doubtless at the instance of Mr. Jefferson, and in 1821 the institution 
whose noble rotunda to-day rises in graceful relief against the blue mountains 
near Charlottesville began to receive State aid, which continued without interrup- 
tion until toward the close of the late war. 

Jefferson planned the University, and it still retains the characteristics which 
he gave it. In the departments of languages, literature, science, law, medicine, 
agriculture, and engineering, it has to-day eighteen distinct schools. For more 
than half a century it has been preeminent among the higher institutions of 
learning in the country, and Northern colleges and universities have borrowed 
from it the feature of an elective system of study. It has latterly established 
excellent agricultural and scientific schools, has a fine laboratory, with an ex- 
tensive collection of raw and manufactured materials, and an experimental farm 
inferior to none in the country. Its government is vested in a rector, and two 
visitors from each grand division of the State, except Piedmont, which, because 
it is the location of the University, is entitled to three. The institution bestows 
no honorary degrees, and makes the attainment of its " Master of Arts" so 
difficult that it will serve as a certificate of scholarship anywhere. Nearly one 
hundred and fifty of the graduates of the several schools are now professors in 
other colleges. The University is by no means aristocratic in its tendencies ; a 
large proportion of the students pay their expenses with money earned by 
themselves, and, since the war, there have been many "State students" who 
are provided with gratuitous instruction. The alumni form an army fourteen 
thousand strong. 

The buildings of the University are not architecturally fine, although the 

main edifice has a rotunda modeled in part after the Pantheon at Rome. The 

country around the elevation a mile west of Charlottesville on which they stand, 

is exquisitely lovely. The great porticoes, whence. one can look out upon lawns, 

* Report of Dr. Ruffner, State Superintendent of Education in Virginia. 



EMINENT PROFESSORS. 



655 



on the trim houses where the professors live, and on the dormitories for the 
students, are beautiful. In the well-arranged and amply-stocked library hangs a 
fine portrait of General Lee, by Elder. Among the academic groves, Long, and 
Key, and Silvester, whose names are eminent both in England and America, 
and Courtenay, Rogers, Emmett and Bonnycastle, famous instructors, once had 
their homes. 




A Water- melon Feast 



LXXIII. 

FROM CHARLOTTESVILLE TO STAUNTON, VA. — THE SHENAN- 
DOAH VALLEY — LEXINGTON — THE GRAVES OF GENERAL 
LEE AND "STONEWALL" JACKSON — FROM GOSHEN TO 
"WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS." 



THE route from Charlottesville to Staunton, through Albemarle and Augusta 
counties, passes some of the finest farming-land in the Piedmont section. 
In summer, one sees fields clad in the green of the tobacco leaf, or in the luxu- 
riant clover, timothy, blue, orchard, and herds' grasses. The fruits flourish in 
perfection ; the pippin, the pear and the grape attain unusual size, and yet have 




Piedmont, from the Blue Ridge. 

delicate flavor. Looking out from the train as it begins to scale the base of the 
Blue Ridge, one gazes down into fertile valleys, with little streams flowing 
through them ; upon expanses of meadow ; and on lusty vineyards clothing 
the hills. 

The Chesapeake and Ohio railroad traverses the Blue Ridge at a point no 
less rich in mountain scenery than that section near the Peaks of Otter through 
which the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio road runs ; but it slips under the great 
ridges, instead of winding among them. The Blue Ridge tunnel, seven-eighths 
of a mile long, was built by Virginia, under the supervision of her State En- 
gineer, Colonel Claude Crozet, an old soldier of Napoleon the Great. This 
persevering engineer worked seven years at the tunnel before he saw light 
through it. 

Coming out from the " great bore," the traveler descries the Shenandoah val- 
ley, the pride of Virginia, outspread in its loveliness before him. As far as he can 
see, his gaze rests upon highly-cultivated farms and noble woodlands. 

"This valley," to quote the words of Major Hotchkiss, of Staunton, author 
of the " Resources of Virginia," " forms the north-eastern third of the great val- 



THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY. 



657 



ley that extends for nearly three hundred and sixty miles diagonally across the 
State." This latter valley in turn "forms about one-tenth of the Appalachian 
valley, that, under the various local designations of Champlain, Hudson, Goshen, 
Kittatinny, Lebanon, Cumberland, Shenandoah, James, Roanoke, New River, 
Holston, East Tennessee, and Warrior, extends from the St. Lawrence to the 
Alabama river," a distance of fifteen hundred miles. It is walled on the east 




View of Staunton, Virginia. 

throughout its whole extent by the Blue Ridge, on the west by the ranges locally 
known as the Catskill, Shawangunk, Blue, North and Cumberland, and is a lime- 
stone tract " embracing thirty thousand square miles of the best farming and 
grazing-land on the continent, margined on each side by inexhaustible deposits 
of richest hematite iron ores. 

The " Shanando'," as the negroes call it, includes about live million acres 
of land, of which nearly two-thirds are either under cultivation or enclosed in 
farms ; the remainder is open to immigrants. The valley is especially noted 
for its grain and grass- growing capacity. In 1866 its wheat product was three 
and a-quarter million bushels ; it produced three million pounds of tobacco, and 
five and a-half million bushels of corn. At the outbreak of the war, it was one 
of the finest stocked farming countries in the world. In Augusta county, at the 
head of the valley, English settlers haVe purchased many estates. That county 
is well underlaid with mineral treasure. Jefferson, in his " Notes on Virginia," 
mentions that, in his time, iron mines were worked in Augusta county. Great 
impetus has been given to the mineral development there by the extension of 
the railroad through the Kanawha valley, which is stocked with cheap and 
abundant fuel, to the furnaces along the Ohio river for which the Virginia 
ores are always eagerly demanded. Lands which contain veins of hematite 
ore are easily obtainable; good agricultural tracts may be purchased from 
$25 to $30 per acre. 

Twelve miles from the base of the mountain through which the tunnel is 
pierced lies the pretty hill-town of Staunton, where two of the principal State 
charities, the Western District Asylum for the Insane, and the Institution for the 
Deaf, Dumb and Blind, are located. As Staunton is also a very central point, 



658 



STAUNTON WEYER S CAVE. 



and one of the healthiest places in Virginia, it is the seat of several semi- 
naries for young ladies. A walk along its steep streets induces the stranger 
to believe that the town has more beautiful girls than are to be found any- 
where else in the South ; but the presence of so many lovely creatures is 
explained by the fact that six hundred lady pupils are gathered there from 
the Middle, Southern and Western States, and that they represent the best 
society of the whole country. The town is also the residence of Dr. Sears, the 
dispenser of the educational fund donated to the Southern States by George 
Peabody. Staunton has a large trade in tobacco and whiskey ; many wealthy 
people have fine mansions on the hills which rise in the rear of the business 
section ; and in summer the hotels are crowded with tourists on their way to the 
mineral springs of Virginia, and to the natural wonders in the vicinity of the 
town. One of the most remarkable of these wonders is Weyer's Cave, a " vast 
subterranean labyrinth of glittering grottoes and galleries," where stalactites 
sparkle in the light of the torches carried by the guides, and " hang from the 
fretted roof like the foliated pendants of a Gothic cathedral." The cave was 




Winchester, Virginia. [Page 659.] 

discovered in 1804, by Bernard Weyer, a hunter of the neighborhood. The 
direct course through it is sixteen hundred feet long; the main path usually 
taken by visitors to the principal apartments and galleries is six hundred and 
fifty feet long. Washington's Hall, the chief curiosity of the cave, takes its 
name from a calcareous formation six or seven feet high, which bears a close 
resemblance to a statue in classic drapery. " Madison's Cave," not far from 
Weyer's, is on the north side of the Blue Ridge, near the intersection of the line 
of Rockingham and Augusta counties with the south fork of the southern Shen- 
andoah river. In Jefferson's "Notes" it is thus described: "It is in a hill of 
about 200 feet perpendicular height, the ascent of which on one side is so steep 
that you may pitch a biscuit from its summit into the river which washes its 
base. The entrance of the cave is in this side, about two-thirds of the way up. 
It extends into the earth 300 feet, branching into subordinate caverns, sometimes 
ascending a little, but more generally descending, and at length terminates in 
two different places at basins of water of unknown extent. The vault of this 
cave is of solid limestone, from 20 to 40 or 50 feet high, through which water 



STAUNTON TO HARRISONBURG. 



659 



is continually percolating. This, trickling down the sides of the cave, has in- 
crusted them over in the form of elegant drapery, and, dripping from the top of 
the vault, generates on that, and on the base below, stalactites of a conical form, 
some of which have met and formed massive columns." 

Northwest of Staunton, in Augusta county, are the Cyclopean Towers, formed 
of limestone. They rise to the height of seventy feet, and resemble the battle- 
ments of a feudal castle. 

Staunton is certainly one of the pleasantest summer retreats in Virginia. The 
road-bed of the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad there is 1,386 feet above tide- 
water. The atmosphere is dry and cool. Sheltered on the east by the barrier 
of the Blue Ridge, and on the west by a loftier range, from which Ellsworth's 
Knob rises to the height of 4,448 feet above the sea-level, the piercing blasts 
which sweep down from the'Alleghanies in winter are broken. The Valley of 
the Shenandoah is often free from snow when the less protected regions adjacent 
are covered with the white veil of winter. 

The Valley railroad now runs from Staunton through Harrisonburg, Stras- 
burg, and Winchester, to Harper's Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and 
Shenandoah rivers. I made the journey from Staunton to Harrisonburg, twenty- 
five miles, in a stage, before the railway was completed. The route stretches 
through a rich, farming country, studded with fine square, antique mansions sur- 
rounded with tall trees. The roads are excellent; the fields are divided by walls 
of the limestone which abounds thereabout, and are well cultivated. Harrison- 
burg is an old-fashioned Virginian town which has awakened into activity since 
the railroad reached it ; the 
citizens are anxious to join in 
the efforts to make a " New 
Virginia" out of the " Old 
Dominion." The Shenandoah 
valley felt the shock of war 
as keenly as any section of 
the South. It was overrun 
by the contending armies ; 
exhausted by the repeated 
foraging expeditions of Con- 
federates and Federals ; and 
at the close of the contest 
its inhabitants were pretty 
thoroughly discouraged. 

Half-way between Staun- 
ton and the Potomac river 
two ranges of mountains run 
parallel for twenty-five miles, 
finally uniting in Massanutten 
mountain, which separates the branches of the Shenandoah river, and ends 
abruptly to the southward in Rockingham county. These parallel ranges hold 




Buffalo Gap and the Iron - Furnace. [ Page 660 ] 



66o 



LURAY STRASBURG — WINCHESTER. 



between them " Luray," a charming valley which was the theatre of many of 
the exploits of Stonewall Jackson early in the war, and through which Sheridan 
campaigned later, leaving devastation in his train. Through the gaps the Con- 
federates kept up communication with the forces on the lower lands of Northern 

Virginia, along the Rapidan and the 
Rappahannock. 

At Strasburg, one of the prettiest 
towns in the valley, one gets a fine 
view of the Massanutten range, whose 
steep wooded sides seem inaccessible. 
The Virginians still point with pride 
to the pass through which Stonewall 
Jackson withdrew his army when 
closely pressed by McDowell and 
Fremont in 1862. The wily General 
saw that the Federals were determined, 
if possible, to capture him, so he led 
his hosts through the upper valley, 
and speedily placed the Massanutten 
ridge between his army and the 
enemy, his guides finding paths along 
the precipices where none but natives 
of the region could possibly have 
discovered them. 

Winchester is one of the oldest 
towns in the valley, and has, since 
the earliest settlements there, been an 
important trade centre. It is the 
chief town of a region rich in historic souvenirs and beautiful scenery. Wash- 
ington made it his head-quarters when commanding the army of operations 
against the French and Indians in 1756. Lord Fairfax and General Morgan 
were both buried there. Not far from Winchester, on the lower Opequan, 
is Traveler's Rest, whither General Horatio Gates retired after his disgrace at 
the battle of Camden. Leetown, still nearer Winchester, was long the home 
of another fallen General, Charles Lee, who conducted himself so badly at the 
battle of Monmouth that he received a stinging reproof from the lips of 
Washington. Lee and Gates were fond of each other's company, but rarely 
visited any of their neighbors. The former lived and died a sceptic. The 
skirmishes and battles around Winchester in which Jackson, Banks, Ewell and 
Sheridan, played important roles, are still talked of. 

Returning to Staunton, and continuing along the line of the Chesapeake and 
Ohio railroad, the traveler will pass through a remarkable cleft in the mountains 
known as Buffalo Gap. It is a passage between tall cliffs which seem to have been 
rent asunder by earthquake or lightning stroke, and through it the buffaloes once 
passed in their annual migrations. Here some Baltimore capitalists have erected 




Elizabeth Iron- Furnace, Virginia. [Page 661.] 



ROCKBRIDGE ALUM SPRINGS. 



66 1 




an iron furnace, and six miles distant, at the ore bank of Elizabeth Furnace, rich 
seams of brown hematite may be seen. A little beyond this is the highest point 
reached by the 
railroad between 
the Chesapeake 
and Ohio rivers, 
2,073 feet above 
the tide. To the 
west are the nu- 
merous Pasture 
rivers, variously 
known as the Cow 
Pasture, the Bull 
Pasture, the Big 
Calf Pasture, and 
the Little Calf 
Pasture, and Jack- 
son's river, which 
are the principal 
sources of the 

Tames Goshen The Alum S P rin S — Rockbrid S e Alum Springs, Virginia. 

on the "Big Calf Pasture" river, is the point of departure for the town of Lex- 
ington, for the Natural Bridge, for the Cold Sulphur and Rockbridge Alum 
Springs, and for the Rockbridge Baths. 

Rockbridge Alum Springs, one of the most celebrated of Virginian watering- 
places, is in the northern portion of Rockbridge county, seventeen miles from 
Lexington, and is now easily reached by an eight-mile ride in a stage-coach 
southward from Goshen. The springs lie in a shallow basin between pretty 

mountain ridges. From 
beneath slate-stone 
arches issue five fount- 
ains, whose waters have 
proven efficacious in a 
variety of chronic ail- 
ments. A pretty hotel 
stands at the base of a 
high mountain; the 
lawns are girdled with 
neat cottages, secluded 
among the trees. The 
waters contain, in com- 
mon with the alum 
which gives the Springs 




The Military Institute — Lexington, Virginia. [Page 662.] 



their name, protoxide of iron, sodium, potash, lime, magnesia and ammonia, and 
sulphuric, carbonic, chloric, and silicic acids. The invalid who is tired of the 



662 



LEXINGTON THE MILITARY INSTITUTE. 



glare and bustle of the crowded Northern spring resorts can find at the " Rock- 
bridge Alum" absolute tranquillity and the charms of a virgin forest within a 
mile from his hotel. The Rockbridge Baths, near the North river, are richly 
impregnated with iron, and are so buoyant with carbonic acid gas that the 
bather floats without effort in the refreshing waters. 

Lexington, twenty miles from the Rockbridge Alum Springs, is filled with 
solemn memorials for Virginians. From the Military Institute* there, the "West 
Point " of the Old Dominion, went out some of the best talent engaged in the 
service of the Confederacy ; three of its professors and one hundred and twenty- 
five of its alumni were killed, and three hundred and fifty of the graduates of the 
institution were maimed in the war. The grave of "Stonewall" Jackson, who 
left the peaceful retreat of his college home to fight for his State against the 
Union, is in the Presbyterian burying-ground. Above the simple mound a board 




Washington and Lee College — Lexington, Virginia. 

headstone, painted in imitation of marble, is now the only memorial of the 
brave General's resting-place ; but latterly an effort has been made to secure 
funds for the erection of a memorial chapel, at the Institute where he was for 
fourteen years a professor, to perpetuate his memory. The Institute was 
destroyed in 1864 by the Federal troops, but has succeeded in securing new 
buildings and re-establishing itself completely without demanding the aid of a 
dollar from the State treasury. In a commonwealth where military discipline 
and training are considered as indispensable parts of a general education, the 
Institute is a great power, and will, doubtless, in future, be fostered and encour- 
aged by the State. Since the war it has extended the benefits of its course to 
pupils from all the States of the Union. 

* The Virginia Military Institute was organized in 1839 as a State military and scientific 
school, on the basis of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point. 



WASHINGTON AND LEE COLLEGE. 



663 



"Washington," or, as it is now called, "Washington and Lee College," 
also located at Lexington, is one of the oldest literary institutions in the South. 
It was established as an academy in 1776, by the Hanover Presbytery, which 
then embraced the whole of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia, and was 
christened Liberty Hall. In 1 796 it obtained its first regular endowment at the 
hands of Washington. The Father of his Country had received from the Legis- 
lature, as a testimony of gratitude for his services, some shares in what was 
then known as the "James River Improvement." He was unwilling to accept 
them for his private gain, and therefore presented them to " Liberty Hall." 
This generous act induced the trustees to change the name of the academy 




Portrait of General Thomas J. Jackson, known as "Stonewall Jackson. 
[From an engraving owned by M. Knoedler & Co., N. Y.] 

to "Washington," and it kept it when it became a college. Rockbridge 
county gave birth to McCormick, the noted inventor of the reaping-machine. 
He has furnished the money to build an astronomical observatory at Washing- 
ton and Lee College, and the Peabody Fund has also given the institution a 
generous sum. 

After the fall of the Confederacy, General Robert E. Lee took the presidency 
of the college, which before the war had rarely gathered more than a hundred 
students at a time within its walls. The fame of the soldier-president, and the 
affection of the Southern people for him, brought the number up to five, and 



664 



GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE. 



sometimes seven hundred. General Lee held the presidency of the college 
until his death, on the nth of October, 1870. The name of the institution was 
then changed to Washington Lee, and George Washington Custis Lee, a son of 
the deceased General, is now president of the institution. 

The University Chapel, in the basement of which are the tombs of General 
Lee and his wife, is a plain brick building, with an auditorium capable of hold- 
ing from eight hundred to a thousand persons. The basement is built of gray 
Virginia limestone blocks, large and rough. The building was planned and its 




General Robert Edward Lee, born January 19, 1801 ; died October 11, 1870. 

erection superintended by General Lee himself. It is unfinished, from lack of 
funds. At the time of General Lee's death the basement was used as a library, 
and near it was the General's private office, which remains exactly as he left 
it when he went out of it for the last time. After his death the trustees and 
faculty of the University appropriated the basement as a place of sepulture for 



THE GRAVE OF GENERAL LEE. 665 

the Lee family. A vault or pit was dug, and walled and cemented in the middle 
of the large room formerly used as a library. The burial case containing the 




The Great Natural Arch — Clifton Forge, Jackson's River, f Page 668.] 

General's remains was placed in this vault, and over it were laid two strata of 
marble slabs, on the upper of which is the following simple inscription : 

Gen. Robert Edward Lee, 

Born 

Jan. 19, 1801; 

Died 
Oct. 11, 1870. 

The wife and daughter of the great Confederate chieftain, who speedily 
followed him to rest, repose beside him. Around the graves of General and 
Mrs. Lee there is a railing of black walnut, and some dark cloth hangings extend 

from the tops of the corner -posts to 
the ceilings above. The present sur- 
roundings will remain only until the 
monument, or sarcophagus, now in 
preparation by the sculptor Valen- 
tine, of Richmond, is finished. When 
that is completed, the whole basement 
will be modeled into a " Memorial 
Room," where as now, one of the 
students of the University will each 
day stand guard as a "watcher at 
the tomb." The monument will cost 
fifteen thousand dollars. 

The railroad route from Goshen to 
White Sulphur Springs, the famous 
watering-place in the West Virginia 
mountains, is lined on either hand 
with exquisite scenery. It extends 
through Rockbridge, Bath, and Alle- 




666 



THE APPALACHIAN BELT 



ghany counties, entering, in the latter, the mountain or Appalachian belt of 
country, which has a width of from twenty to fifty miles, and is very equally 
divided between the States of Virginia and West Virginia. In the twenty 
counties — ten on each side of the State line — included in this region, there was, 
in 1870, a population of only 148,509 persons, or twenty to the square mile. 
Hundreds of thousands of acres of dense forest still clothe the mountain-sides; 
hickory, all varieties of the oak, wild cherry, spruce, pine, black walnut, ash, 
chestnut, all abound ; finely-timbered land being held at from $10 to $25 per 




Falling Springs tails, Virginia. [Page 667.] 

acre. All the slopes and hill-sides and the table-lands are covered with a rich 
and mellow soil that gives a fine yield, when properly cultivated, of wheat, corn, 
oats, potatoes, and all root crops. Mr. Howell Fisher, a Pennsylvania iron-master, 
who has carefully studied this Appalachian belt, says that cattle and sheep " fatten 
and flourish on the herbage and undergrowth without other food, and with liter- 
ally no care." The opening of a railroad through this region has made it one 



WARM SPRINGS 



•MILLBORO 



667 



of the most desirable in the two Virginias. On the extensive plateaus between 
the depressions formed by the washing of the streams there are fine grazing and 
orchard-lands, and millions of acres, now held as wild lands, are available for 
field culture, vineyards, or 
sheep pasturing, and can be 
purchased for trifling sums. 

A little beyond Goshen 
the rail penetrates the rocky 
pass of Panther Gap, so 
called because the early 
settlers found to their sorrow 
that panthers loved to dis- 
port therein. From North 
mountain to the Allegha- 
nies the scenery is wildly 
beautiful. Ravines, hill-sides, 
with ragged forests, log cab- 
ins beside rushing streams, 
vistas of perfect valleys, the 
high peak of Griffith's Knob, 
blue outlines of massive 
mountains, charm the eye. 
The "Cow Pasture" river 
flows beside the tracks for 
some distance, then . disap- 
pears among the hills. From 

Millboro' one may take stage for the " Warm Springs," 
fifteen miles away, in a lovely valley in Bath county. At 
the lower end of this valley is the famous " Cataract of 
the Falling Springs," where a stream flowing down from 
the "Warm Spring" mountain falls over a rock two hundred 
feet high, jeweling with its many cascades the bright grasses 
and ferns below. The view from Warm Spring mountain is 
accounted one of the most beautiful in Virginia, and not far from it, on the 
banks of the Cow Pasture river, is the " Blowing Cave," from which such a 
current of air constantly comes that the weeds for twenty feet in front of the 
cavern are prostrated. The Hot and Healing Springs are but a few miles from 
the Warm Springs valley. 

At Millboro' for many years the trains of the Virginia Central railway 
crossed a yawning ravine by means of a temporary track, running down one 
slope and up the other at a grade of hundreds of feet to the mile. But when 
the Consolidated railroad line was completed, this ravine was filled up, and the 
occupation of " Mac," the old engine driver, whose locomotive, " Mountain 
Climber," used to push the trains up the hill, was gone. The artist has 
rescued him from oblivion. 
43 




Griffith' 



668 



CLIFTON FORGE — COVINGTON. 





•*• ■ ; 


tii K ' 


tlSiUM 


; 




v vtt 




> > "-'.i 


>*'»»i:? 




; 


V ^ 


BsMMij 


y^: 







Clay Cut, Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. 



At Clifton Forge, where Jackson's river rushes through a gorge, to unite with 

the many bright streams flowing down to form the James, a mighty arch of a 

half-mile chord, and a thousand feet to the 

keystone, is visible on the mountain-side. In 

this defile the clink of hammers on the anvils 

of 'numerous forges was once heard; but only 

the walls of the buildings, overgrown with 

vines, remain. The James River and Kana- 
wha canal is one day to have a channel here, 

and the wild loneliness and romance of the 

place will then be gone. 

Covington, a sprightly town on Jackson's 

river, is a favorite point of departure from 

the railroad for the Hot and Healing Springs. 

On the road leading from it to the Sweet 

Springs, the clear waters of a little creek come 

rushing from a rocky cleft at Beaver Dam 

with a noise and patter far exceeding Lodore, 

which Mr. Southey made so many rhymes about; and with picturesqueness 

of dark green in the foliage, and 
brilliant refractions and reflections of 
broken sunlight in the descending 
drops. 

At Covington one is confronted by 
the Alleghanies. Here, more than 
two hundred miles from Richmond, 
a city was once laid out, but it has 
never grown beyond the dimensions 
of a village. Covington was to have 
been the western terminus of the 
Virginia Central railroad, and the 
canal was to have been extended to 
this point. A road was to have been 
built from it to the Ohio by the 
State of Virginia, and the products 
of the mines and fields of the West 
were to be reshipped at Covington. 
This was a part of the internal im- 
provement system which the Old 
Dominion was inaugurating when the 
war came. The great fight over, 
Virginia found that she had no funds 
with which to carry on the important 
enterprise, and offered all that had 
■Mac, the Pusher." [Page 66 7 .] been done in improvements from Rich- 



THE DESCENT TO THE 



"WHITE SULPHUR. 



669 



mond to the Ohio river to any company that would complete the task. Both 
Virginia and West Virginia readily agreed upon a harmonious policy with regard 
to the line, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Company finished the road on the 
terms offered by the two commonwealths. 




At Jerry's Run a mighty ravine has been carved and cut away, to allow the 
road a passage among the mountains. For miles the roadway is carried over a 
succession of artificial embankments and through long cuttings in the crags. 
The train traverses the ravine so high above the stream that the water looks like 
a silver thread stretched through the valley. Then, at an elevation of more than 
two thousand feet above the level of the sea, the road passes under the mount- 
ains by the "Alleghany Tunnel," and gradually descends toward the "Green- 
brier White Sulphur," the most noted of Southern watering-places. 



LXXIV. 

GREENBRIER WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS — FROM THE "WHITE 

SULPHUR" TO KANAWHA VALLEY — THE MINERAL 

SPRINGS REGION. 



THE White Sulphur Springs are situated on Howard's creek, in Greenbrier 
county, West Virginia, and on the western slope of the Appalachian mount- 
ain chain, which separates the waters that flow into Chesapeake bay from those 




that empty into the Mississippi. 
On the south is Kates' mountain ; 
on the west the Greenbrier range, 
and northward and eastward, at a 
distance of five miles from the 
springs, the Alleghanies tower in 
lovely confusion. The valley in 
which the springs lie is one of the 
most beautiful in the mountain region of the South. It is planted with great 
numbers of noble and finely-grown trees, and in early autumn the leaves of the 



"WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS. 



67I 



maple, the hickory, the oak, the chestnut, the sweet gum, and the pine, vie in 
color with the gay toilets in which the Southern belles clothe themselves for the 
final hops and " Germans" of the season. The lawn around which the cottages 
are grouped is rich in foliage ; in the hottest days of summer, when the lifeless 
atmosphere of Richmond seems like a curse suspended over the heads of the 
citizens, the air is cool and delightful at the "White Sulphur." 




The Hotel and Lawn at Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. 

All the region round about was once a hunting ground of the Shawnee 
Indians, who knew the Greenbrier valley as one of the most frequented "licks" of 
the deer and the elk. The valley takes its name from the river, which was 
christened by old Colonel John Lewis, an early explorer, who once became entan- 
gled in a brier- thicket on the banks while exploring, and vowed that he would 
ever after call the stream Greenbrier. Toward the close of the last century, the 
Indians often brought those of their number afflicted with difficult diseases to the 
valley, where the unfortunates were speedily cured by drinking the water and 
bathing in it. 

But in those days there were no roads ; the Indians were far from friendly, 
and our revolutionary fathers had neither the time nor the money to spend in 
improving the beautiful resort. The Virginia planters learned of its charms, and 
as early as 1818 the tract was somewhat improved; but it was not until 1837 
that the White Sulphur Spring Company was formed by a number of Virginians, 
who made the place what it is to-day. They erected a mammoth hotel covering 
an acre of ground ; surrounded it at a convenient distance with neat cottages, 
built upon terraces, on the hill-sides and on the borders of the lawns; laid out 
serpentine walks, and gave the hitherto crude valley the aspect of a fashionable 
watering-place. The springs had been frequented, up to the date of these 
changes, almost exclusively by Southern people. The planters from the lowlands 



672 



"white sulphur" in the season. 




-V ' 



;ffiE 



came in their carriages, attended by troops of servants, scattering plenty in 
their path ; money flowed like water during the two or three months of the 
season ; and when the merry company departed a wail of anguish went up from 
the mountaineers, who saw their golden harvest checked for a twelvemonth. 
During the war the place was alternately a Federal and a Confederate head- 
quarters. The cavalry of both armies clattered over the mountain roads, leaving 
destruction behind them. But the growth of railway enterprise in Virginia, 

during the last dozen years, 
has given the watering- 
place a railroad ; and the 
lawns, the springs, and the 
mountain roads of the 
White Sulphur are rapidly 
gaining a national reputa- 
tion. 

It must have been a 
tedious journey to the val- 
ley in the days of stage- 
coaches and private car- 
riages, for the springs lie 
in a difficult mountain 
region. The Chesapeake 
and Ohio Railroad Com- 
pany had to build some of 
its highest trestles, and dig 
some of its longest tunnels, 
within a few miles of 
"White Sulphur." At one 
point between Staunton 
and the springs, the tun- 
nels, within a few minutes' 
ride of each other, aggre- 
gate more than two miles 
in length. One of them, 
called the "Big Bend," is 
6,400 feet long. 

Now- a- days, however, 
the traveler may ensconce 
himself in his berth in a luxurious sleeping-car at Richmond in the evening, and 
awaken at White Sulphur in the morning, just as the first breakfast bell is 
warning the sleepy ladies to prepare for their conquests of the forenoon. The 
journey from Washington to White Sulphur occupies but fifteen hours. 

From July until September the season is at its height. The trains bring 
hundreds of passengers every evening ; the cottages and hotels, as well as the 
few surrounding farm-houses, are crowded. The lawns are dotted with sprightly 




,-'- : -v: ■'■■■;?>'vy;:!4,v / 







The Eastern Portal of Second Creek Tunnel, Chesapeake and 
Ohio Railroad. 



SOCIETY AT THE "SPRINGS." 



673 



parties, representing the society of every Southern, and latterly of most of the 
Northern and Western States. The "hotel" is a remarkable structure, resem- 
bling the " Kursaal " at the German baths rather than the vast palaces in 
which the habitues of Saratoga dance, flirt, eat, and sleep in the season. It is 
amply provided with long and solid verandas, with a huge ball-room and a 
colossal reception parlor. Between ball-room and parlor is a dining-room three 
hundred feet long, in which twelve hundred guests may at once be seated. There 
are but few rooms for lodgers in the hotel. From the cottages on Alabama, 
Louisiana, Paradise, Baltimore, Virginia, Georgia, Wolf, and Bachelor rows, or on 
Broadway, or in the " Colonnade," or on "Virginia Lawn," or at the "Spring," 
the belles come skipping across the green sward to dinner, attired in full evening 
dress. There are never a dozen carriages at the White Sulphur during the 
season. There is no whirl and glitter 
of ambitious equipages, the whole life 
and charm of the society being concen- 
trated in the mammoth building called 
the hotel. At early morning the par- 




A Mountain Ride in a Stage -Coach. [Page 675.] 

lor is filled with ladies who make their engagements for the day, and with the 
customary rows of invalids who chat cheerily, or listen to the music of the pianos 
or the band upon the lawn. After breakfast there are sometimes from five 
hundred to a thousand persons gathered in the parlor, promenading for an hour, 
after which the crowd separates into small parties, who linger on the verandas, 
or under the oaks, or along the shaded paths in that famous resort known as 
the " Lovers' Walk," where hundreds of hearts have been broken. 

As the hour for the evening meal, dinner or tea, according to the visitors' 
taste, approaches, the parlor is once more crowded. At dinner an army of four 
hundred waiters skillfully supplies the guests with food. The scene is novel and 
dazzling. Hundreds of beautiful girls from every part of the South, clad in ball- 
room costume, are seated at the round tables in the long hall. The dark-haired, 
languishing Creole of Louisiana is contrasted with the robust and bewitching 
Kentucky belle; the delicate blonde of Richmond chats amicably with the 



6/4 THE LADIES — A PLEASURE RESORT. 

stately Mississippian ; the lovely Baltimore ladies twirl their fans and frown 
defiance at Northern beaux ; the sparkling belles of Charleston and the pretty 
mountain maids from the West Virginian capital may be seen side by side. The 
West and the East, the South and the North seem to have forgotten their sec- 
tional bickerings, and to have come together in friendliest mood. Ex- Generals 
of the Confederate army — Beauregard, Johnston, the Lees — chat amicably with 
United States Senators from the North and West; men who would gladly 
have flown at each other's throats a few years ago now reviewing the war with 
utmost calm. The South sends its best representatives to the White Sulphur 
Springs every year, and the result is a delightful, unostentatious, cultured 
society. The " hops " and the Germans given by the fashionable Philadelphia 
and New York ladies are the only dissipations ; neither regattas, nor horse-races, 
nor tumultuous tumbling in surf distract one. Every morning the groups gather 
in the pavilion, under which the sulphur water bubbles up from the spring ; the 
young ladies make the wonted wry faces over the unsavory beverage ; while the 
venerable planters from the lowlands, with many a thought upon their damaged 
livers and yellow faces, swallow the fluid as if it were nectar. 

" Greenbrier White Sulphur," as the Southerners call it, is a pleasure resort 
Not one-tenth of the throng which crowds cottages and hotel in the season 
comes to regain its health. It comes rather to rejoice in a superabundance of 
life and vigor. But the waters are singularly efficacious in many obstinate dis- 
eases.* As an alterative they have no superior. The effect of a free use of the 

* The White Sulphur Water was analyzed in 1842, by Professor Hayes, of Boston, with 
the following results : 

" Fifty thousand grains (about seven pints) of the water contain, in solution, 
3.633 water-grain measures of gaseous matter, or about 1.14 of its 
volume, consisting of — 

Nitrogen gas 1-013 

Oxygen gas 108 

Carbonic acid 2.444 

Hydro-sulphuric acid . . ... ..... . . .. , 068 

- • . - - 3.633- . 

" One gallon, or 237 cubic inches, of the water, contains 16.739-1000 cubic inches 

of gas, having the proportion of — > 

Nitrogen gas ...... ......:. .- . r. :■...._■..-..[.,.:■. . : . ... .-. .;. 4.680 • , 

.... „ • Oxygen gas..... .... ... , ... , .498 

Carbonic acid 11.290 

Hydro- sulphuric acid :..... ........ r. .. . .271 

16.739 

"Fifty thousand grains of this water contain 1 15.735-1000 grains of saline matter 
consisting of — 

Sulphate of lime .,. . . . . ... .... ..... 67.168 

Sulphate of magnesia 30.364 

Chloride of magnesium .859 

Carbonate of lime . 6.060 

Organic matter (dried at 2120 F.) 3.740 

Carbonic acid 4-5^4 

Silicates (silica 1.34, potash .18, soda .66, and a trace of oxide of iron) 2.960 

115-735" 



rr 



OTHER "SPRING RESORTS. 



6/5 




Anvil Rock, Greenbrier River. 



waters much resembles that produced by mercury, without any of the dis- 
agreeable contingencies attendant on the employment of that medicine. The 
sulphur baths, which constitute one of the attractions of the place even for well 

people, are admirably kept. A visit 
to the spring, a bath, and a horseback 
ride among the mountains, or a walk 
along "Dry Creek" before break- 
fast, will certainly fit one for the 
fatigues of the merry "evening," even 
if there be a "German" which lasts 
until daybreak. 

Within a radius of forty miles from 
the Greenbrier White Sulphur lies the 
most interesting portion of the Vir- 
ginia Springs region. Northward are 
those already mentioned, the Hot, the 
Warm, the Healing, and the Alum 
Springs. Seventeen miles eastward from the White Sulphur are the Sweet 
Springs ; twenty-four miles to the south the Salt Sulphur ; forty-one miles to the 
south the Red Sulphur ; and twenty-two miles to the west the Blue Sulphur. At 
all these springs fine hotels have been built, and as the season wanes at one it 
waxes at another, so that one may make a jolly round for three or four months. 
At some of these resorts the furnish- 
ings of the cottages are primitive, and 
one sadly misses the elegance of city 
life ; but the natural beauties and the 
delicious atmosphere amply compen- 
sate for all other deficiencies. Al- 
though most of the Springs are now 
either directly accessible by rail, or 
within easy distance of the railroads, 
it is the fashion to make the tour in 
such a stage as our artist has given a 
picture of, although the passes in the 
mountains are rarely as rough as they 
are depicted in the engraving. Many 
parties adjourn to the Old Sweet 
Springs after the season at the Green- 
brier is over, stopping on the way for 
picnics. The " Old Sweet" always has 
a company of distinguished guests. 
It is located in a charming valley in 
the eastern part of Monroe county, A West virgInia "Countryman." 

with the high Sweet Spring mountain on the south, and the Alleghanies only 
a mile away. The buildings are elegant and commodious; the lawns as beauti- 




6y6 



THE RED SWEET, THE RED, AND BLUE SULPHUR SPRINGS. 



ful and richly studded with trees as those in the Greenbrier valley. The baths 
are frequented from dawn until dusk by crowds who represent the best talent of 
the West and South. The predominance of carbonic acid in the waters of these 
springs induces physicians to recommend invalids who have been drinking the 
White Sulphur water for some time to try those of the "Old Sweet" for per- 
fecting and fixing the cure already reasonably well established. 

The Red Sweet Spring, situated but one mile from the Old Sweet, is one of 
the prettiest retreats in the mountains. The chalybeate and tonic waters annu- 




A Freighters' Camp, West Virginia. [Page 679. J 



ally draw hundreds of visitors to them. The Salt Sulphur, shut in among the 
mountains near the town of Union, has three springs, one of which is called the 
" Iodine," and is strongly recommended for chronic affections of the brain, and 
for nervous diseases. The Red Sulphur, in the southern portion of Monroe 
county, is romantically situated on Indian creek, in a deep ravine to which the 
traveler descends along the side of a picturesque mountain. The waters of this 
spring have been found a powerful adjunct in the management of difficult cases 
of phthisis and consumption. At the " Blue Sulphur" a spacious hotel, a beauti- 



POLITICS AT THE SPRINGS. 



677 



ful lawn, and a fine establishment of medicated baths are the attractions grouped 
about the spring, which is covered by an imposing temple.* 

The Northerner is especially welcome at all these watering-places. There is 
none of the bitterness and occasional small spite manifested toward him which he 
might perhaps encounter in some of the Southern capitals. The courtesy and 
hospitality of the Virginians are proverbial; their frankness and kindliness toward 
strangers are shown in their best light at the " Springs." The subject of politics 
is pretty thoroughly eschewed at White Sulphur during the season, except when 
the President goes there to hear what the Southern politicians have to say, or 
when some injudicious relict of the late war utters something fiery at a reunion 
or a convention. The whole company of distinguished Southerners at White 




II 



1, 



lip 



4 

," ..ft 











^mlS^S^%^ 



"The rude cabin built beneath the shadow of a huge rock." [Page 679.] 

Sulphur, in 1873, condemned the bitter and hostile speech made by Jefferson 
Davis at a meeting of the Southern Historical Society at the " Montgomery 
White" that season. The Northern or Western man at these springs is never 
likely to hear disagreeable sentiments unless he provokes them by illiberality on 
his own part. He will find the Southern people assembled there amply able to 
take a fair and dispassionate view of our national politics. Gentlemen ot culture 
and refinement will show him how possible it was for the South to believe that it 
was right in the war. But all will convince him that they are much more inter- 
ested in the material development of the Southern States than in quarreling over 
* See appendix for complete table of routes in and about the Virginia Springs region. 



678 



WEST VIRGINIA S CHARACTERISTICS. 




old issues. Leading politicians will now and then intimate that some day the 

Southern State Constitutions will be amended ; and from this it will be easy 

to perceive that the South is not yet 
reconciled to reconstruction. 

The Springs region of Virginia 
seems likely to become a favorite 
meeting-ground for Northern and 
Southern people. As soon as the 
Chesapeake and Ohio railroad was 
opened to the Ohio river, Cincinnati 
sent a large quota of visitors to the 
" Greenbrier White Sulphur," and the 
Virginians have found, much to their 
surprise, that there is a fair share of 
culture and manners at the West. The 
free and friendly intercourse between 
citizens of the different sections, which 
has been the result of yearly visits to 
the charming resorts in the mountains 
of Virginia and West Virginia, cannot 
fail to have an influence for good in 
their future political relations. The 
wild life of the mountaineers, and the 

strange humors and habits of the negroes scattered through the Springs region, 

offer an interesting study to the visitor from the North and West. The country 

in the vicinity of the White Sulphur 

Springs has many prosperous farms ; 

fine cattle are to be seen in the fields ; 

the grazing is excellent the year round. 
West Virginia does not bear the 

aspect of a slave State; its farms have 

the same thoroughly cultured and well- 
kept appearance as those at the North. 

But few slaves were owned in the 

mountain region ; the wealthy families 

had some house-servants who, as a 

rule, still remain with them. The 

negroes who come to these mountain 

regions from the lowlands seem to 

thrive. They proved themselves one 

of the most useful laboring forces that 

could be employed in the building of 

the new railroad. They Were en- The Junction of Greenbrier and New Rivers. 

dowed with vigorous health, were easily managed, sober, and quick to learn. 
The beautiful Greenbrier river flows downward from Greenbrier mountain 



"The rustic mill built of logs." [Page 679.] 




NEW RIVER ITS RAPIDS. 



679 



through Pocahontas, Greenbrier, and Monroe counties, to unite with the New 
river, which rises in North Carolina, and courses through some of the most 
romantic mountain scenery in West Virginia, until it meets and joins with the 
Great Kanawha river at the entrance of the famous Kanawha valley. Along the 
Greenbrier and New rivers adventurous boatmen ply in " batteaux," carrying 
merchandise or travelers who wish to explore the wonders of the New River 
canon. The lofty and thickly- wooded hills ; the vales carpeted with flowers and 
overhung by giant trees ; the camps of the " freighters " who transport goods 
over the rough roads along or near the banks ; the rustic mill built of logs, and 
insecurely set beside some treacherous hill-side stream ; the rude cabin beneath 
the shade of a huge rock; and the types of "countryman," inquisitive and sus- 
picious — all are strangely interesting, 
and amply repay the traveler for the 
fatigues of the journey. 

Our artists, who made the tour of 

the New river canon in a batteau, found 

it an exciting experience. At the 

junction of the Greenbrier and New 

rivers they engaged one of the boats 

used in running the 

rapids. This boat 

was sixty feet long 




Descending the New River Rapids. 



~f&t£TW<),*t 



by six wide, and was managed by three negroes, — the "steersman," who guided 
the boat with a long and powerful oar ; the headsman, who stood on the bow to 
direct the steersman by waving his arms ; and an extra hand, who assisted with 
an oar in the eddies and smooth parts of the river. The merry artists not only 
found time for exciting scrambles along the rocky banks, in search of pictures, 
but even when descending the New River rapids managed to obtain the necessary 
notes from which to give the world a faithful representation of the event. 

The country near the junction of the Greenbrier with the New river literally 
stands on end. The people live on hill-slopes so steep that the horses can hardly 
keep their footing when they plough ; and it is sometimes said that the farmers 
in the canon stand on one bank and shoot their seed corn into the field on the 
other from a rifle. 

The New River canon is one of the most remarkable natural wonders of the 
eastern portion of the United States. It is a deep crack in the earth, a hundred 



THE NEW RIVER CANON. 



miles long, a mile wide at the summit, from eight to fifteen hundred feet deep, 
and traversed at its bottom by a turbulent stream. The railroad builders found 
this canon practicable for the passage of their route. They blasted out fragments 
of rock until they had made a shelf along the perpendicular rocky side of the 
canon. Entering this strange gorge by train, one scarcely realizes that he is 
hundreds of feet below the level of the surrounding country. The scenery is 
grand. The journey along the rocky shelf, whence one can look upon the enor- 
mous masses of stone hurled down to make room for the track, or look up to 
the streams of water flowing from the sides of the cliffs, is an experience never 
to be forgotten. 

But there is one remarkable characteristic of the canon which the traveler 
through it by rail or in batteau will notice with care. He will observe that the 
stratification of the rocks is very singular; that they lie evidently as they were 
deposited ; that there has been no upheaval, no disorganization. The earth 
has simply been cracked asunder, and the traveler is able to enter, without 
difficulty, a coal-shaft which is open to the sunlight, and through which a rail- 
road runs. 

A coal-shaft ? Yes ; out of the high bank a coal-seam crops. In some places 
many seams are visible. The railroad has here and there cut through veins of 
the best cannel coal, and the miner has only to dig into the mountain. The mine 
drains itself, and the precious mineral is dumped directly into cars which carry it 
to Richmond. In 1871 it was impossible to ride through this canon on horse- 
back. Now it is as easily accessible as any manufacturing town in the North. 
The coal and limestone in this New River valley lie within a hundred miles of 
some of the richest and most important deposits of iron ore in the United States. 




A hard road for artists to travel. 



LXXV. 

THE KANAWHA VALLEY — MINERAL WEALTH OF WESTERN 

VIRGINIA. 



EMERGING from the New River canon, one reaches the Great Falls of the 
Kanawha, a stream formed by the junction of the New and Gauley 
rivers. The country sur- 
rounding was the scene 
during the late war of much 
strife between the Federal 
Rosecrans and Wise and 
other Confederate officers. 
A few miles from Kanawha 
Falls, in the direction of 
Greenbrier White Sulphur, 
the " Hawk's Nest," an im- 
posing bluff rising a thou- 
sand feet above the bed of 
the New river, frowns upon 
the railroad. From this 
height, to which a winding 
path leads, one may look 
down over perfect valleys, 
unsurpassed by those of 
Rhine or Moselle. The 
scene at Miller's Ferry, 
where the stream winds 
through deep recesses in 
the hills, is one of the most 
sublime in the South. The 
"Richmond" and "Big 
Dowdy" Falls on the New 
river, and "Whitcomb's 
Boulder," in this vicinity, 
are worthy of the traveler's 
attention. 

The Kanawha and Ohio 
valley, or trans- Appalachian region, which lies along the western foot slopes of 
the Alleghany range, has an area of seventeen thousand five hundred square 







The "Hawk's Nest," from Boulder Point. 



682 



MINERAL WEALTH OF THE KANAWHA VALLEY. 




Great Kanawha Falls. [Page 681.] 



miles in West Virginia. Most of this area is seamed with wonderful strata of 
bituminous, splint, and cannel coal. Its agricultural advantages also are con- 
siderable, tobacco, corn, and root crops 
paying well. As a live-stock country, 
this valley resembles the "blue-grass" 
lands of Kentucky, which join it on 
the west. The farmers are industrious, 
intelligent, and reasonably prosperous. 
But the mineral wealth of the Ka- 
nawha valley now usurps all the atten- 
tion directed to that quarter. The coal- 
measures there actually cover sixteen 
thousand square miles. They make 
their appearance at the surface, in the New River and Kanawha valleys, to 
the number of fourteen distinct strata, " with an aggregate thickness in some 

places of one hundred feet, 
more than half of which is 
in workable seams from 
three to eight feet thick." 
The coal crops out on the 
hill-sides, high above the 
water and railroad levels, al- 
lowing easy and inexpensive 
excavation. The testimony 
of Mr. Howell Fisher upon 
this point is as follows : 

" In respect to conditions 
most essential to cheap and 
profitable working, this re- 
gion stands unrivaled. The 
chasm of the river renders it 
most peculiar service in its 
relation to the coal. Cutting 
all the coal strata for nearly 
its whole length entirely 
through, and getting down 
among the shales under the 
coal, the river has caused 
the numerous streams which 
pierce the whole coal region 
to cut down through most 
of the coal-bearing strata on 
their courses, leaving the 
coal entirely above water- 
level, accessible at hundreds 




EASY ACCESS TO ITS COAL, 



68 3 



of points by simply scraping off the surface soil, so that, as far as the mere get- 
ting of coal is concerned, two thousand dollars will open a mine ready to ship 
one thousand tons per week. There is no region in the world where less 
physical labor will prepare a mine for the delivery of coal at the drift's mouth. 

"This will be made clearer by a comparison of the position of coal here and 
in Great Britain in this respect. In Great Britain, and in fact in almost all of the 
European coal-fields, the coal is deep below the water-level. To reach the 
seams requires the expenditure of years of labor and vast sums of money in 
sinking shafts or pits, and in erecting pumping and hoisting machinery, to be 
maintained and renewed at heavy annual expense. It is authoritatively stated 
that the cost of sinking shafts in the Newcastle region of England to the depth 
of one thousand feet, has been, in many instances, one thousand dollars per 
yard. In the great Northern coal-field of Great Britain, producing twenty mil- 
lion tons per annum, there are two hundred pits or shafts, costing, in first outlay, 




Richmond Falls, New River. [Page 681.] 

for sinking and machinery, fifty millions of dollars, to which must be added the 
necessary expense of constructing and maintaining proper air-courses, and their 
accessories requisite to the safety of the employes. 

" Now in this great Kanawha coal-field nature has already sunk all the neces- 
sary pits and shafts, which need neither repair, renewal, nor labor to work them. 
The laws of gravity have provided the most perfect, permanent, and costless 
pumping machinery; and the ventilation of the mine and safety of the employes, 
instead of requiring scientific knowledge and anxious thought, is simply a matter 
of the most ordinary care, the freedom from noxious gases being the natural 
result of the position of the coal strata." 

There is coal enough along the line of the railroads and rivers in this favored 
section to supply the American market for several centuries. Professor Ansted, 
of England, explored this region nearly a quarter of a century ago, and gave 
his testimony at a meeting of the Society of Arts in London, two or three years 
since, that " there was no coal-field more important than that of Virginia ; 
44 



684 



TESTIMONY OF PROFESSOR HOTCHKISS. 



none where the coal-seams were more accessible or of a better quality. The 
coal-fields in the Appalachian range were nearly all horizontal, intersected by 
convenient valleys, could be worked from numerous points at the same time with 
ease, and might be looked upon as inexhaustible." 







Big Dowdy Falls, near New River. [Page 681.] 

Professor Hotchkiss, of Staunton, Virginia, in a paper on the Resources of the 
State, speaks as follows of the Kanawha coal-field : 

" On the eastern border the seams of the lower coal-measures are found, having an exposed 
aggregate thickness of some fifty feet in the gorge of New river— the line of the Chesapeake and 
Ohio railway— a canon from 1,200 to 1,500 feet below the general level of the country. One of 
these seams is over six feet thick, furnishing a good coking coal ; another seam of block coal is 
four and a-half feet thick. There are several other seams three and four feet in thickness, 
furnishing bituminous coals of good quality. These seams have only a moderate inclination to the 
north-west, and are all above the river and railroad-level. These lower measures descend more 
rapidly than the rivers, and so pass beneath the water-level some fifty miles from their eastern 



ARRANGEMENT AND THICKNESS OF STRATA. 



68 5 



outcrop. The strata of the upper coals come to the horizon as the mouth of New river is ap- 
proached, and not far below the junction of that river with the Gauley to form the Great Kana- 
wha. At Armstrong's creek, a section in the 600 feet of bluff above the level of the Kanawha 
shows thirteen seams of coal varying in thickness from two and a-half to nine feet, with an aggre- 
gate of sixty-one feet. Below this place, at Cannelton, on the other side of the Kanawha, there 
are five seams of coal open, in the 1,300 feet of the face of the bluff, aggregating twenty-nine 
feet. More than 100 feet of stratified coal has been proved here. The seams vary from eight 
to fourteen feet in thickness, and embrace gas, shop, splint, and cannel varieties. The seafn 
producing the cannel is double, giving four feet of cannel and two and a-half of splint coal. 
This cannel will yield sixty gallons of oil to the ton of 2,000 lbs. A section on Cabin creek and 



600 Ft. 



' - 


^~ 




500 — 


IgggHSBSfl 


Thick. 

Hg 

7-6 

5-6 Cannel 
Flint Vein. 

7- Stockton's 

Cannel. 
2-6 

3 


45° — 








400 




35° — 




300 — 




11- Splint. 




„„ _,,„.„„,„. 


f- PYRITOUS CI.AY 

3 D bituminous. 
4- Cannel. 
6 ^ 


25° — 




200 








150 — 




< 


100 


. 


3J 3 






2-6 55 
4- 3 
6-6 h 
1,6-6 (S 


50 _ 




0. 


i < - y 



Level of Armstrong's Creek. 
Section of Kanawha Coal-Seams. 




Whitcomb's Boulder. [Page 681.] 



vicinity, ten miles below Cannelton, by Prof. Ansted, gives sixty-eight feet of coal, in some 
thirteen seams, varying from two and a-half to eleven feet ; twenty-two feet of these seams are 
cannel and from seven to eleven splint coal. At Campbell's creek, still lower down the river, in 
the 400 feet of bluff, are six seams, from four and a-half to six feet thick, that furnish twenty- 
nine feet of coal. This coal is peculiar in its formation. Near Clay Court-House, on Elk river, 
the coal strata are from four and a-half to eleven feet thick, making forty-one feet of coal in the 
500 feet of bluff; nineteen feet of the coal being splint and six cannel. At the mouth of Coal 
river a stratum of coal, from four to eight feet thick, is found at a depth of 300 feet ; of course 
the other seams are found there also, but at greater depths. These may be considered fair 
samples of the sections throughout this great coal-field, ample enough to satisfy the wants of un- 
told generations, and so accessible as to require no special skill in mining ; nor expenditure for 



686 



MINERAL WEALTH OF THE BLUE RIDGE. 



drainage and ventilation. The Baltimore and Ohio railway, with its Parkersburg and Wheeling 
arms and numerous branches, now crosses the northern part of this field and opens it to markets. 
The Chesapeake and Ohio railway has just crossed it in the south, where the Great Miner has 
' torn asunder the mountains,' and well and wisely cut an open gangway, more than a thousand 
feet deep, across the rich strata, exposed them to daylight, and at the same time made way for 
the railroad, at very low grades, to carry this ' bottled sunshine' to the great markets. The 
coals found here are used in making iron without coking, and the choice for any special purpose 
is very great, the quality being unexceptionally good." 

Cannelton, mentioned by Professor Hotchkiss, was established by a Rhode 
Island company, who built works there for the milling of coal into oil. Just 
as the work was progressing fairly, the oil region of Pennsylvania was dis- 
covered, and the proprietors of Can- 
nelton, unable to compete with the 
flowing wells of Titusville, closed their 
works, for without transportation facili- 
ties their coal was worthless. But with 
the advent of the railroad came a for- 
tune into their hands, and to-day they 
let coal down an inclined plane 1,100 
feet long from the almost perpen- 
dicular side of the mountain, directly 
into cars waiting on side tracks to 
receive it. 

In previous chapters I have given 
some idea of the extent of the stores 
of iron in South-western Virginia and 
the Piedmont country. The deposits 
of iron ore are no less remarkable 
along the line of the Chesapeake and 
Ohio road. In that part of Piedmont 
penetrated by this line, there are hem- 
atite and magnetic ores of the best 
quality. In the spurs of the Blue 

The Inclined Plane at Cannelton. Ridge, near Fishei'ville, 3. Seam of 

hematite ores exists, and rich lodes of hematite and specular ores are found 
running along the foot of the Blue Ridge ; at intervals, in the whole breadth 
of the Shenandoah valley; "and in continuous seams of great thickness along 
the north and parallel mountains beyond." 

"The mineral wealth of the Blue Ridge," says Professor Hotchkiss, "is great, 
and destined to be quite important, from its nearness to the sea-board. In the 
ranges of foot-hills lying along the western base of these mountains, the whole 
three hundred or more miles of their length, are found very extensive deposits 
of brown hematite iron ores of the best character, giving from sixty to seventy- 
five per cent, of metallic iron in the yield of the furnace. It is not correct to 
say that these deposits are continuous, and yet they have been so regularly found, 
when sought after, as almost to justify the use of that term. In some places they 




FURNACES ORE-POCKETS — LIMESTONE. 



687 



are deeply buried in the debris of the mountain ; at others they show themselves 
as interstratified masses, conforming for long distances to the formations of the 
district, as near where New river leaves the Ridge, at Radford Furnace, where 
the stratum is over thirty feet in thickness, while at other places the ore, in a soft 
state, forms hill-like masses, as at the Shenandoah Iron Works, in Rockingham. 
At one place in Rockbridge, where the stratification is nearly vertical, striking 
with the mountain, this one appears as a hard central stratum, forming the crest 
of a spur more than 600 feet above its base. The western flank of the table- 
land in the south-west is known as the Iron mountain, from the quantity of this 
ore there exposed. There are numerous furnaces now in blast, and others are 
being built along the line of these deposits, making charcoal iron of a high char- 
acter, such as now readily commands sixty dollars a ton in the United States. 
One of these had a yield of sixty-five per cent, of iron from the ore put into the 
furnace in the run of a season. Between these hematites and the main ridge is 

found a deposit of specular 
iron-stone." 

In the slopes of the North 
mountain there are numerous 
lodes or pockets of ore inter- 
stratified with limestone. The 
ore-beds in the western por- 
tion of Augusta county, and 
in one or two adjacent coun- 
ties in Virginia proper, are 
very extensive. Their aston- 
ishing bulk and their conven- 
ient position near the surface 
have prompted trustworthy 
experts to declare them among 
the most remarkable on the 
continent. From Gordonsville 
in the Piedmont district, to 
Huntington on the Ohio river, 
a distance of three hundred 
and twenty-five miles by the 
railway line, there is a constant 
succession of minerals. All the 
elements of successful and pro- 
fitable coal mining and manu- 
facture are there found closely 

Fern Spring Branch, a West Virginia Mountain Stream. associated. The iron Ores are 

rich and of great variety ; the carboniferous limestone is excellent for fluxing pur- 
poses, and there are inexhaustible stores of coal. In Greenbrier valley the lime- 
stone is bordered by deposits of ore on one side, by coal-measures on the other.* 
* See appendix for article on the Iron of the Virginias. 




CHARLESTON — ITS GROWTH. 



Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, is pleasantly situated near the 
confluence of the Elk and Kanawha rivers, in a bold mountain country. A 




steamboat plies between the city 
and the railroad depot on the steep 
side of a rocky ledge. The deck 
hands may any day be seen shovel- 
ing coal from a vein in the river- 
bank into the coal-bunkers of the 
steamer, and in the hills which over- 
hang the stream veins crop out at 
points where they can be very 
easily mined. At the close of the war Charleston was a small village, but its 
selection as the State capital, and the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio 
railroad, gave ' it a new start. 



It now has three or four thous- 
and population ; a cultured so- 
ciety ; one of the best hotels in 
the South, the Hale House ; an 
elegant State capitol ; an opera 
house; fine structures for 
schools and churches, and many 
handsome private mansions. 
For forty years before the war 
the people of Charleston were 
wealthy and cultured. The salt- 
mills and furnaces along the 
Kanawha, and the cultivation 




The Hale House — Charleston. 



COMMERCE OF CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA. 



689 



of the fertile bottom lands, brought plenty and prosperity. But no farmer or 
land-owner ever thought of opening coal mines — of developing the riches which 
they daily trampled under their feet. Even to-day the old-school farmers seem 
hardly to appreciate the value of their mineral lands, and show a decided disin- 
clination to develop them. When they can get what they consider a good price, 
they will gladly sell ; but they cannot be induced to risk much of their own 
capital in mining. Charleston is the central point and the most convenient outlet 
for five great sections of Western Virginia, all of which in a few years will doubt- 
less be provided with railroads. There is no city within one hundred miles of it 
which can become a rival in the lumber, coal, salt, and manufacturing interests 




Rafts of Saw- Logs on a West Virginia River. 

of the Kanawha, Elk, and Coal River valleys. The lumber trade along the Elk 
river is very important ; hundreds of rafts are floated down that stream to the 
mouth of the Kanawha, and thence into the Ohio. A single company sends 
twelve hundred thousand bushels of coal down the Coal river annually. The 
Elk River railroad will soon connect Charleston with Pittsburg and the East, 
and the Parkersburg, Ripley and Charleston road is an important route recently 
projected. Manufactures are creeping into the West Virginia capital. It begins 
to assume the thrifty and active appearance of a New England city. On the 
banks of the Kanawha there are many pleasant towns, rapidly increasing in 
population. Prominent among them are Point Pleasant, Buffalo, Raymond City, 
Winfield, St. Albans, Brownstown, Coalburg and Cannelton. 



690 



THE KANAWHA SALT REGION. 



The completion of the James River and Kanawha canal would, undoubtedly aid 
immensely in the development of the resources of the Kanawha valley. The canal 
is now completed from Richmond to Buchanan, 197 miles, leaving a gap of 303 




tiki* , -. & - - ,V 



■■■>;., 



• . ! .- ■ m 








! ^^ 3S ^ F ' 






-irjirjS'r-iif-iiiiFiy'aiilj'ij - ,,,; ,;J^V sK- 3 !-?*!* 



The Snow Hill Salt Works, on the Kanawha River. 

miles yet to be built between that point and the mouth of the Kanawha. The 
importance to Virginia and the Western States of a line of cheap water trans- 
portation from the Ohio river to the 
Chesapeake bay can hardly be over- 
estimated. 

The salt region tributary to Char- 
leston extends from that place fifteen 
miles on either side up the Kanawha 
river. The annual product from the 
wells in the region is about two million 
bushels. It might readily be increas- 
ed to twenty. The Snow Hill furnace, 
owned by Dr. Hale, of Charleston, is 
one of the largest in the world, and in 
1870 produced more than four hun- 
dred thousand bushels of excellent 
salt* This important interest and 











■*^^i&S&>&- ^Si$0M^ 



Indian Mound, near St. Albans [Page C91.] 

* At the Snow Hill works the brine is drawn from nine wells, each from eight hundred 
to one thousand feet deep. They are bored through about three hundred feet of sandstone, 
below which the brine is found. From forty-five to fifty gallons make a bushel of salt. At- 
tached to the salt works is a bromine factory, where a hundred pounds of this odorous drug 
are daily made. The coal used for fuel for all this work is taken from a five-foot seam on 
the adjacent hills. 



STAPLE AGRICULTURAL 




691 

the lumber trade will in a few years 
make Charleston a large city. The 
Kanawha river and its tributaries 
drain one of the finest bodies of 
timbered land in the United States 
The white oak, the white and yellow 
poplar, the black walnut, the shell 
bark and « white heart hickory," grow 
to enormous heights; the white ash 
the locust, the linden, the birch, the 
sycamore, and the iron-wood exhibit 
a development rarely seen in the 
Northern forests. 

The agricultural advantages of 
the country surrounding Charleston 
are numerous. Not only are the river 
bottom lands fertile, but the mount- 
ain-sides may be profitably culti- 
vated. Corn, wheat, rye, oats, and 
barley are profitable ; the culture of 
tobacco, the grape, and orchard fruits, 
has proved very successful. There 
is nowhere a better country for 
r| sheep-raising, and the English 
settlers have given much attention 
to this specialty. 

On the road from Charleston to 
the Ohio river, one passes through a 
rich and extensive timber country. 
Between Charleston and St. Albans 
there are some singular conical- 
shaped hills, supposed to 'be the 
work of that lost race known as the 
"Mound Builders." Crossing the 
Coal, the Scary, the Hurricane, the 
Mud, and the Guyandotte rivers, 
the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad 
reaches the Ohio river at Hunting- 
ton, a new and pretty town, am- 
bitiously laid out as a "future great 
city." It stands at the head of 
what is known as reliable navigation 
on the Ohio; steamers of light 
draught can reach it at all seasons, 
and there is never danger of any 



692 



HUNTINGTON A SUPPLY POINT GUYANDOTTE, 



interruption of transportation. Huntington is an important supply point for the 
inhabitants of the lower Ohio valley, who, before the building of the route from 
Richmond through the mountains, often suffered a coal famine because the upper 
Ohio was obstructed. From Huntington the supply will be constant and regu- 
lar. South of the town lie deposits of splint and cannel coal, and the neighbor- 
ing counties in Kentucky are rich in both coal and iron. The State Normal 
School of West Virginia, formerly Marshall College, one of the elder collegiate 
schools of the Old Dominion, stands within the "city limits." The Chesapeake 
and Ohio Company have also established their construction shops, in which an 
army of operatives work, at Huntington. 

Guyandotte is prettily situated on the river of the same name, at its conflu- 
ence with the Ohio. It was once a trading place of much importance, and still 
has a commerce of its own with the back-country. The farmers and lumbermen 
from the mountain districts come down the river in barges, which they propel 
with long poles ; and one of the most curious sights in the Southern highlands 
is a group of these rustic watermen storing their boats with provisions purchased 
from the merchants at Guyandotte. 




^#Fff 



The result of climbing a sapling— An Artist in a Fix. 



LXXVL 

DOWN THE OHIO RIVER — LOUISVILLE. 

THE French explorers called the Ohio La Belle Riviere; and certainly, when 
its banks are full, and a profusion of flowers dot the cliffs here and there 
overhanging the stream, or are reflected from the lowlands in the shining water, 
one readily recognizes the appropriateness of the term. But the Ohio river, on 
a foggy morning, late in autumn, when sycamores are stripped and flowers 
are gone, hardly recalls the affectionate name which the Frenchmen bestowed 
upon it. 

The traveler, journeying from Huntington to Louisville on the Ohio, finds but 
little in natural scenery that is impressive ; much, however, that is very beau- 




The Levee at Louisville, Kentucky. 

tiful. In summer, when the shores are clothed in green and the vineyards are 
resplendent with foliage, there are many landscapes which charm the eye. Inas- 
much as the channel in midsummer contains little more than a " light dew," as 
the Western captains call it, navigation is attended with peculiar difficulties, and 
steamboats of lightest draught are often detained for days on a treacherous bank 
suddenly laid bare. 

No river is more subject to extreme elevations and depressions. The 
average range between high and low water is said to be more than thirty feet. 
The highest stage is in March, and the lowest in August. In times of flood the 
variations are so rapid that the river at Cincinnati has been known to rise at the 



694 SCENERY ALONG THE OHIO. 

rate of one foot per hour during half a day. It requires no little skill and sea- 
manship to navigate this peculiar stream. Obstructions were originally very 
numerous, and the passages between the exquisite islands and the sand-banks 
require the tact and courage of ocean sailors. The days of keel-boat, of Ken- 
tucky float, of pirogue, of gondola, skiff, and dug-out, are past. Lines of 
rail have superseded the noble packets which sailed from Louisville to New 
Orleans, and much of the romance of the river has departed. Yet there is 
a certain fascination in the journey by night along the great current which slips, 
although rapidly, apparently with a certain laziness, past the low shores sprinkled 
with log cabins. 

From Huntington, the terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad, in 
West Virginia, to Cincinnati, the voyage is exceedingly interesting. The 
towns on the Kentucky shore, while few of them are large or bustling, have a 
solid and substantial air. Around the various taverns in each of them is 
grouped the regulation number of tall, gaunt men, with hands in pockets, and 
slouched hats drawn over their eyes. A vagrant pig roots here and there in 
the customary sewer. A few cavaliers lightly mount the rough roads leading 
into the unimposing hills ; a few negroes slouch sullenly on a log at the foot of 
the levee, and on a wharf-boat half a hundred white and black urchins stare, 
open-mouthed, as if they had never seen steamboats or strangers before. 

On the Ohio side of the river there are large manufacturing towns, evidences 
of thrift, industry and investment; iron-furnaces smoke; and the clatter of ham- 
mers and the roll of wheels are heard. 

The distance from Pittsburg, in Pennsylvania, to Cairo, in Illinois, where the 
Ohio pours its muddy flood into the muddier waters of the Mississippi, is 967 
imiles. The tourist who takes a packet from Wheeling, in West Virginia, to 
Parkersburg, will see some noble scenery ; for the upper Ohio, when navigation 
is practicable there, far surpasses in beauty the lower portion of the stream. 
Descending from Parkersburg he will pass Pomeroy, Gallipolis, Catlettsburg, 
Ironton, Portsmouth, Maysville, Ripley, and Cincinnati, and will note on the 
banks many salt, nail, and iron manufactories. From Cincinnati he can have 
his choice of two or three steamers daily for Louisville, and from the Ken- 
tucky metropolis can drift on to Evansville, in Indiana, and thence to Cairo. 
At Maysville, in Kentucky, between Huntington and Cincinnati, there are two 
extensive cotton factories and several iron foundries. The town contains many 
handsome streets, and is the entry port for the north-eastern section of the State. 
It is also the most extensive hemp market in the whole country. 

Between Cincinnati and Louisville there are but few towns of importance on 
the Kentucky shore of the Ohio. At Big Bone Lick, in Boone county, great 
numbers of bones of the mastodon and the Arctic elephant were once found. 
At Warsaw, a few miles below, there are many tobacco factories. Carroll- 
ton, formerly called Fort William, stands at the junction of that beautiful stream, 
the Kentucky, with the Ohio. 

The scenery along the Kentucky river justly ranks among the wildest and 
most picturesque in the United States. For more than 200 miles, as the stream 



IMPROVEMENT OF THE OHIO RIVER. 



695 



flows north-west to empty into the Ohio, it passes through massive limestone 
ledges, arranged upon either side of its narrow channel in great cliffs, forming 
irregular canons, or pours over rapids, or glides between precipices 500 feet high, 
whose tops almost touch, like roofs in the streets of an old Italian town. 

The river flows through Middle Kentucky for the greater portion of its course. 
The confluence of the small streams which make it is at the spot known as the 
" Three Forks," in Lee county, the very heart of the coal and iron region 
which stretches away for miles in every direction. During the winter and 
spring coal and pig-iron are floated down the river in barges. 




A familiar scene in a Louisville Street. 



The improvement of the Ohio river and its tributaries is highly necessary. It 
is demanded by more than one-fifth of the States, and one-third of the whole 
population of the country, and inasmuch as that population has hitherto paid 
thirty-five per cent, of the internal taxation of the Union, and as it raises forty 
per cent, of the farm products of the land, owns forty per cent, of the farm-lands 
and of the live stock, and thirty-six per cent of the capital in farming implements 
and machinery, it would seem that it has a right to ask of the Government this 
boon. The sum demanded for the work will depend largely upon the plan 
adopted for its accomplishment. The estimates of engineers have varied from 



696 



LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY. 



seventeen to sixty millions. No definite decision as to the wisest plan has yet 
been reached. Those most directly interested are still in doubt whether to de- 
cide upon supplying the required volume of water by aid of reservoirs, or main- 
taining the proper navigation by low dams with open chutes, or slack-watering 
the entire stream. 

The commerce of the river is immense. The amount of coal transported 
from Pittsburg down the Ohio increased from fifty million bushels in 1869 to 
ninety millions in 1872, or more than twenty-six per cent, per annum. The ton- 
nage of the port of Pittsburg in 1869 was estimated at eight hundred thousand 
tons; in 1872 it was one million six hundred and sixty-nine thousand tons. The 
commerce along the stream amounts to nearly nine hundred millions of dollars 
yearly. The Ohio drains an area of 214,000 square miles, and could furnish 
cheap transportation for the commerce of fifty millions of people. 

Louisville, the chief city of the goodly commonwealth of Kentucky, lies on 
the southern bank of the Ohio river, at a point where the navigation of the 
stream was originally obstructed by rapids. For six miles above the site of the 
city, the stream stretches out into a smooth sheet of water, a mile wide, and em- 
braces within its limits the mouth of Bear Grass creek, which affords a safe har- 
bor for the myriad barges and flat-boats which drift on the bosom of the great 
stream. Situated centrally between the cotton-fields of the South and the grain- 
fields of the West, amply supplied with rail- 
ways piercing both West and South in all 
directions, and with ten miles of river-front 
from twenty to twenty-five feet above highest 
flood mark, the city has a promising commer- 
cial future. Its levees, while they are not so 
picturesque, and the life along them is not so 
vivacious as that which one sees at New Or- 
leans, Savannah, and Charleston, are yet quite 
as fine as those of any Southern or Western 
city. What Louisville has lost in river trade, 
since railroads came in, she has gained in rail- 
way commerce. The days of tedious steam- 
ing from Louisville to the Louisiana lowlands, 
in roundabout ways and along treacherous 
currents, are gone, and have pulled down with 
them into oblivion many noble fortunes ; but 
the city grows and prospers despite the mis- 
fortunes that have overtaken the commerce 
once its mainstay. Opposite Louisville, on 
the Indiana shore, are the towns of Jefferson- 
ville and New Albany ; the former pretty and dull, the latter a kind of Western 
Brooklyn, having ready communication with Louisville by means of the great 
railroad bridge, a triumph of mechanical engineering, which has long spanned 
the stream. 




A Waiter at the Gait House, Louisville, Kentucky. 



ITS INSTITUTIONS. 



697 



West and south of the city the lots are lovely, and admit of unlimited 
extension ; and on the broad and shapely streets which are one of its peculiar 
features stand many handsome mansions, each one of which is set down in 
a capacious yard, well kept, and now and then embellished with terraces. The 
streets which run parallel with the river, and not far from the levee, are long, and 
flanked with solid business blocks, very uniform in architecture, and as devoid of 
pretense and show as is the character of the men who built them. Main, Market, 
Jefferson and Green streets are all filled with large and handsome shops and 
warehouses, and many of those which cross them at right angles, extending in- 
definitely into the vast plains, are devoted to residences. 




Scene in the Louisville Exposition. 

Louisville is famous for several excellent institutions, noteworthy among 
which are the "Gait House," a massive stone structure in the English style, long 
celebrated by foreign travelers as the best hotel in the United States; the 
Louisville Courier -Journal, the successor to the old Journal, on which Prentice 
expended his wit, and upon which those who were wounded by his shafts vented 
their spleen; and the " Public Library," the outgrowth of an ingenious lottery 
scheme conducted by an ex-Governor of the State, and now a thriving insti- 
tution with museums and lecture-rooms attached. The Courier -Journal, edited 
to-day by the sprightly Watterson, whose courageous attitude in reproving 
many of the prime faults in Kentucky politics and civilization, and whose 



698 ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH CHRISTOPHER GRAHAM. 

trenchant style in his editorials, have rendered him famous, has long had a 
sensible influence on the political and social life of the State. 

The Commercial, a Republican newspaper, has grown and prospered, as its 
party grows in Louisville, steadily and surely. 

The City of Louisville was surveyed as early as 1770, when parties came 
from Fort Pitt, now known as Pittsburg, and examined the land adjacent to the 
Falls of the Ohio, with a view to parceling it as "bounty territory." In 1773, 
Captain Thomas Bullitt, the deputy of a special commission from William and 
Mary College in Virginia, moored his bark in Grass harbor, and with his little 
band of hunters made numerous surveys. Death, however, interrupted his 
labors, which were largely instrumental in the definite settlement of Kentucky. 
In 1778, Colonel George Rogers Clarke, who had for some time fought the 
British along the Ohio, took possession of and fortified Corn Island, opposite the 
spot now occupied by Louisville. In 1779, Louisville was permanently estab- 
lished ; cabins, block-houses and stockades were erected. Clarke and his 
hunters lived in constant danger, and battled with the Indians for many a long 
day. In succeeding years, Louisville grew up a scraggy, rude town, whose 
streets were here and there intersected with ponds of stagnant water ;* and so 
unhealthy was the location considered that it was known as the " grave-yard of 
the Ohio." If the denizens of the Louisville of the past could visit the thriving 
and healthy Louisville of to-day, with its miles of elegant streets, its smooth 
pavements, its fine hospitals and churches, its mammoth hotels and pretty 
theatres, its bustling "Exposition," and its brilliant society, they would hardly 
believe the evidence of their senses. 

Life in this pleasant metropolis of 130,000 inhabitants is socially very attrac- 
tive. Nowhere in the country is frankness and freedom of manner so thoroughly 
commingled with so much . of high-bred courtesy. The people of Kentucky 
really, as Tuckerman says, illustrate one of the highest phases of Western charac- 
ter. They spring from a hardy race of hunters and self-reliant men, accustomed 
to the chase and to long and perilous exertion. The men of Kentucky, while 
they are not afflicted with any peculiar idiosyncrasies, are intensely individual. 
There is something inspiring in the figure of a grand old patriarch like Christo- 
pher Graham, now in his ninety-second year, erect, vigorous, and alert as an 
Englishman at sixty. Born in the wild woods of Kentucky five years before it 
became a State, he has lived to see a mighty change pass over the commonwealth 
where he cast his fortunes; and he delights to tell of the days when men went, 
rifle in hand, about their daily work, and when the State was constantly troubled 
with Indian incursions. Mr. Graham was long noted as the best marksman, with 
a rifle, in America, and has had, in his eventful life, a hundred adventures with 
Indian, guerilla, and bandit. The product of a rough, and, in some respects, bar- 
barous time, when shooting, swimming, leaping, wrestling, and killing Indians 
were the only exercises considered manly, he is to-day a gentle old man, busied 
with works of charity, and with the upbuilding of a fine museum of mineralogy 
in Louisville. 

* See " Casseday's History of Louisville." 



LXXVII. 



A VISIT TO THE MAMMOTH CAVE. 



THE country along the line of rail from Nashville, in Tennessee, to Cave 
City, in Kentucky, whence travelers depart in rickety stages over the 
rough routes for the Mammoth Cave, is especially rich in fine farms. In autumn, 
when golden sunlight lingers lovingly over the great arched trees, and makes 




Mammoth Cave, Kentucky — The Boat Ride on Echo River. 

checker-work upon the reddish soil, a ride through this highly- cultivated country 
is thoroughly charming. : The people one meets are mainly rough country 
farmers, plodding sturdily to court on, fine horses, or journeying from farm to 
farm. 

At Glasgow Junction and Cave City, on the Louisville and Nashville railroad, 
primitive hotels receive the visitor, and rival stage-drivers fill his ear with alarm- 
ing rumors of each other's incapacity. At Cave City a sleepy waiter drowsily 

45 



700 



OUR APPROACH TO THE CAVE, 



gives inexact information, and negroes, with persistent demand for backshish, 
follow the unfortunate Northerner and clutch his carpet-bag, despite his efforts 
to retain it. 

Edmondson county, in which the Mammoth Cave is situated, is rich in natu- 
ral curiosities. On Dismal creek, a perpendicular rock, 163 feet high, towers 
like a black spectre against the crystal vault of the sky, and the inhabitants invest 
it with many strange and highly apocryphal legends. Near the town of Browns- 
ville is a large cave containing a petrified tree, and on Indian Hill are the remains 
of a fortification, with mounds and burial-places scattered over the acres in the 
vicinity. 




Th"e Entrance to Mammoth Cave (Looking Out). 

The visit to the Mammoth Cave, which we made with a merry party, was 
in autumn, when the sunlight, tempered by fresh breezes, seemed to permeate 
every nook and cranny of the forests through which the road wound over hill and 
across plain. The vehicle in which we embarked at Glasgow was rickety and 
venerable, as also was the horse which drew it; and the driver beguiled the 
way with stories not calculated to impress us favorably with the hotel near the 
cave. Indeed, so great was his animosity toward the proprietors of that hotel, 
that he refused to set us down within the high fence which inclosed the building, 
and indulged in a lively passage-at-words, calculated to awaken quarrelsome 
feelings with the host when he came up to welcome us. 

The hotel is a huge, rambling structure, built in Southern style, with long 
porches and surrounded by a pleasant lawn dotted with noble trees. Passing the 



ENTRANCE CHEERY PSALM SINGING. 701 

primitive counter, on which lay the "Mammoth Cave Register," and paying the 
fees exacted from every visitor, we donned overalls, blouses, and flannel caps, and 
found ourselves face to face with an amiable darkey, who, taking up two swing- 
ing lamps, led the way down a rocky descent toward a black opening from which 
came a rush of cold air. Over the yawning mouth of the cave a stream of water 
was pouring, and around the sharp rocks on the brow of the hill were graceful 
fringes of mosses and leaves, and festoons of ferns. Shadows fell gloomily against 
the sunlight as we hastened down the declivity, and a wandering bat, giving a 
faint scream, flew directly in my face, and then darted back into the darkness. 

A tree, apparently growing out of the solid rock, stretches its trunk over the 
chasm. This trunk is moss-grown, and both the moss and the leaves upon it have 
a pale yellowish tinge. Descending a few steps, and suddenly losing the genial 
warmth of the sun, we were forced to stoop, and to plunge forward, almost upon 
all fours, into the stony recesses. 

Our dusky guide now supplied us each with a swinging lamp, by whose dim 
light we soon became accustomed to the narrow pathway, everywhere singularly 
free from obstacles. The cool air was so exhilarating, that after a march of 
several miles, clambering over stones, filing carefully along the edge of abysses, 
and escalading innumerable cliffs, we scarcely felt fatigue. 

Unlocking a rude iron gate, the guide ushered us into a second narrow corri- 
dor, from the roof of which, as the light penetrated the gloom, hundreds of bats 
flitted down and circled about our heads, screaming, as if resentful of the intru- 
sion. On the return journey the bats usually make the promenade through this 
gallery quite exciting, and many a timid lady remembers with horror the gaunt- 
let she there ran. 

We wandered on for several hours, the cheery guide singing psalms in a 
round musical voice, and turning from time to time to caution us against ventur- 
ing into unexplored by-ways where pitfalls were numerous. Now we plodded 
through a mighty gallery, whose walls and ceilings seemed frescoed by the hands 
of man rather than incrusted with stalactite formations ; now climbed miniature 
mountains ; now looked down hundreds of feet into deep wells. Each of the 
galleries and recesses has been christened, but the visitor sometimes finds it 
difficult to detect in the fantastic forms of rock the resemblance suggested by the 
names. We visited the Rotunda, a vast chamber which seemed like the 
council-room of some ancient castle. Then, after exploring many antechambers 
and halls, we entered Audubon avenue. After wandering in that mighty gallery, 
whose roof is sixty feet above its smooth floor, we returned to the passage 
through which we had entered, passing into the main cave, and visiting, in 
rapid succession, the " Church," the ruins of some old saltpetre works, the 
Kentucky Cliffs, the Gothic Gallery, the Gothic Arcade and Chapel, the Reg- 
ister Hall, the Altar, Vulcan's Forge, and, finally, the Devil's Arm- Chair, a huge 
stalactite, beautiful in color, in which we enthroned one of the ladies accom- 
panying the party. The Gothic Chapel, through which we wandered half- 
convinced that we were dreaming, is rich in noble ornaments, its columns 
rivaling in the nicety of their proportions those of the finest cathedrals. The 



J02 



THE GOTHIC AVENUE THE 



IALL-ROOM 



Gothic avenue, reached by a detour from the main cave and an ascent of some 
thirty feet, is two miles in length, and a promenade along it discloses an 
uninterrupted panorama of natural wonders which seem the work of giant archi- 
tects rather than the result of one of nature's convulsions. All the stalactites 

and stalagmites in the cave are ex- 
tremely rich in color, and look as if 
they had been carefully polished. The 
ceiling of the " Gothic Avenue " is as 
smooth as that of any mansion. 
Passing the "Devil's Arm- Chair," 
and stopping for a moment to inspect 
the "Elephant's Trunk" and the 
"Pillars of Hercules," we came at last 
to the "Lover's Leap," a large pointed 
rock more than ninety feet above the 
roadway, and projecting into an im- 
mense rotunda. 

The "Ball -Room" is a mighty 
chamber, admirably fitted for the 
dance, with a rocky gallery even, in 
which from time to time an orchestra 
has been placed when gay parties from 
Louisville and other neighboring cities 
have engaged in festivities, with music 
and torches. A short distance beyond 
looms up a huge mass of rock, known 
as the Giant's Coffin. Passing the de- 
serted chamber, the " Wooden Bowl Cave," where oxide of iron and lime are 
sprinkled on the floor, and crossing the " Bridge of Sighs," we came to the 
"Star Chamber," where our guide had prepared for us a genuine surprise. 
Mysteriously commanding us to be seated in a dark corner, and saying that he 
would return to find us on the morrow, he suddenly seized the lights and with- 
drew. We heard his sonorous voice echoing along the galleries as he hurried 
back over the pathway, and while we were yet wondering what was the object 
of this sudden manoeuvre, we saw above us twinkling stars, and seemed to catch 
a glimpse of the blue sky from which we had thought ourselves shut out by the 
solid rock. Indeed, so strange was the illusion, that we fancied we could feel the 
fresh air blowing upon us, and, for a few moments, imagined that the guide 
had conveyed us by some roundabout way to the mouth of the cave, and then 
had hastily left us, that he might enjoy our surprise. But presently we heard 
his voice, confessing the cheat. The dark ceiling of the Star Chamber is 
covered with a myriad incrustations, sparkling like stars; and the artful guide, 
by a careful arrangement of his lamps and the use of Bengal lights, had pro- 
duced a magical effect. The ceiling, which was not more than forty feet from 
our heads, had seemed remote as the heavens. It was like the very early 




Mammoth Cave -In "the Devil's Arm- Chair." 



WRIGHT S ROTUNDA THE FAT MAN'S MISERY. 



703 



dawn, when the stars are gradually fading and seem no longer to belong in 
the sky. The guide, in the distance, imitated to perfection the crowing of the 
morning cock, and then burst into loud laughter as, removing the lamps, he 
exposed the trick, and returned to us. 

From the Star Chamber we descended to "Wright's Rotunda," which has a 
ceiling of four hundred feet span without a single pillar to uphold it, and 
wandered on through the Black Chambers, where masses of shelving stone 
reminded us of old baronial castle walls and towers ; and ascending thence into 
an upper room, in which we caught the whispers of a far-away waterfall, trans- 
lated, upon our crossing the room, into the roar of a cataract falling sullenly 
down deep and hidden recesses. Next, crawling upon our hands and knees 
under a low arch, we entered the Fairy Grotto, whence we retraced our steps 
to the entrance of the cave. The bats gave us a lively reception as we passed 
through the gate around which they flitted as sentinels, and it was not until 
after we had climbed the hill, and stood in the hotel garden for some time, 
that we missed the sun, so accustomed had we become to the darkness during 
our long sojourn in the cave. 

Early next morning we were once more treading the corridors, and by 
nightfall had made a journey of eighteen miles. The experiences of this sec- 
ond day were far more novel and interesting than those of the first. 

The various passages of the cave 
have a total of more than two hun- 
dred miles in length, and many of 
those not often seen are said to sur- 
pass in beauty those commonly visited. 
To my thinking, nothing, however, in 
subterranean scenery can be finer than 
the mighty and ragged pass of El 
Ghor, whose jagged peaks, frightful 
ravines, and long recesses, filled with 
incrusted rocks, on which the swing- 
ing lamps threw a changeful shimmer, 
extend for long distances. On this 
day we also made the acquaintance 
of the " Fat Man's Misery," which 
the artist has faithfully depicted, and 
through which some of our party 
found no little difficulty in pressing. 

Crossing the black and deep river 
Styx by a natural bridge, and safely 
ferrying over Lake Lethe, we passed 
through a level and lofty hall called the " Great Walk," and soon arrived at 
"Echo River," on whose moist and muddy shore a rude barge was drawn up. 
The stream seemed shut in by a huge overreaching wall of solid stone, and we 
turned in amazement to the ebony guide, who motioned us to take seats in the 




The Mammoth Cave — "The Fat Man's Misery." 



704 



A DARK VOYAGE STEPHEN. 



boat, jumping in when we had obeyed, and rowing boldly forward into the 

blackness. From time to time the wall seemed to press down upon us, 

and we were obliged to bend close to the seats. The guide sang loudly as 

we floated through the darkness, our little lights making but tiny specks in 

the gloom. The sense of isolation from the world was here complete. We 

seemed at last to have had a glimpse of the infernal regions, and imagined our- 

^^^^^^^—^^^^^ selves departed souls, doomed to a 

^^jgflj J reluctant ride in Charon's bark. A 

' m '-/- ' ^ " V V- := deep silence fell upon all the visitors ; 

>■• , j§88fc " ~ Sl|8 but the guide still sang loudly his 

'"- V ? " J -'■' '"■' '"• '" . '.. $? ,' pious psalms, only ceasing them to 

burst into laughter when the ladies 
cowered as we rounded some rocky 
corner, and seemed about to be 
crushed against a lowering wall. 

After half an hour of this mys- 
terious journeying we approached 
another shore, and left behind us the 
archway. Before us lay a vast region 
of black and desolate pathways over 
high rocks and under huge boulders, 
along avenues brilliant with stalactites 
and resplendent with sparkling ceil- 
ings. Here we were recalled to a 
knowledge of the outer world by 
encountering a return party, escorted 
by Stephen, one of the first guides 
who ever penetrated the cave, and 
concerning whom a curious story is 
told. 

Stephen had for many years urged 
a white man living near the cave to 
build a boat with which to explore 
the Echo river. When at last it was 
built, and a voyage under the arches 
was decided upon, he (Stephen) was 
afraid to undertake it, but was com- 
pelled at the pistol's mouth to enter 
the boat and proceed. Neither he 
nor the white man entered upon 
this daring feat without fear and trembling, for no one could have predicted 
that the stream would find its outlet beyond the cave, in Green river. Echo 
river is certainly one of the most remarkable streams in the world. It is here 
and there wide and deep enough to float a steamer of the largest class. A few 
fish are now and then caught in it. They have no eyes, and certainly need none. 




Mammoth Cave — 



Subterranean Album. 



BLUE LIGHTS PITS VANDALISM. 705 

The journey from this stream through the pass of El Ghor, Silliman's 
Avenue, and Wellington's Gallery, all the latter leading up to St. Mary's Vine- 
yard and the Hill of the Holy Sepulchre, was fatiguing ; and when we returned 
at nightfall we found that the day's journey had quite demolished our stout walk- 
ing shoes. 

The burning of blue lights in various places where the ceilings are covered 
with sulphate of iron produces marvelous effects. No palaces, no castles, 
ancient or modern, rival in beauty or in grandeur the corridors and passages of 
the Mammoth Cave. In one of the long avenues we saw the Veiled Statue, a 
perpendicular rock which, from a distance, as one turns around the angle of the 
way, looks exactly like the figure of some ancient goddess clad in draperies. 
Many of the incrustations or "formations," as our guide called them, are in the 
form of rosaces, some rivaling the most beautiful bits of Gothic architectural 
decoration. The shading is bold and beautiful, and the lines and curves delicious. 
The pillars seem to flit away like ghosts as one comes suddenly upon them in 
the dim light given by the lamps. Occasionally one reaches a place where the 
cave seems to afford no outlet into passages beyond ; but the guide turns sud- 
denly to right or left through narrow archways, or down little steps to new 
wonders. The journey is a succession of surprises. One of the most curious 
experiences is a look into the " Bottomless Pit," which is reached from the " De- 
serted Chambers ;" and a glance at the Dead Sea, into which one may shudder- 
ingly peer from a precipice eighty feet high, is not without its fascination. A 
young telegraph operator from Michigan once descended into a hitherto unex- 
plored pit in the cave, and found bottom 198 feet down. He narrowly escaped 
death, however, for the rope with which he was lowered was cut nearly in two 
by the sharp rocks in which it caught. The best features of the cave are the 
Dome, the Bottomless Pit, and the Pass of El Ghor. Their grandeur and beauty 
amply repay the journey of thousands of miles which European and American 
tourists make to see them. 

Vandalism has made its way into the Mammoth Cave. The lamps given 
visitors are sometimes attached to a rod, by means of which industrious snobs 
smoke the letters of their names upon the sides and roofs of some of the corridors. 
Thousands of people have thus testified their thirst for notoriety, and many a 
shock is given the impressible traveler by finding the name and date of some 
obscure mortal recorded on a rock which he had fancied heretofore unseen by men. 

The cave is said to have been first discovered in 1802 by a hunter, who 
strayed into it in pursuit of an animal that had taken refuge there. It now 
belongs to nine heirs, who each receive about $1,000 yearly income from it. 
Were the facilities for reaching it better, the heirs might readily receive $50,000 
annually for an indefinite period. 

The cave has repeatedly been offered for sale for half a million dollars, and 
Louisville capitalists have talked from time to time of forming a company for its 
purchase, and erecting a new and splendid hotel in its immediate vicinity. 

Gathered about the great fire-place of the hotel office in the evening, the con- 
versation drifted to Kentucky politics, and one of the Englishmen who had been 



yo6 



THE KU-KLUX. 



exploring the cave with us inquired curiously about the Ku-Klux. The Ken- 
tuckian in charge of the hotel answered that the Ku-Klux in that section were 
called Regulators, and they never troubled any except bad people. " They are 
composed," he said, "of the gentlemen in the neighborhood, and when those 
gentlemen are annoyed by vicious neighbors they warn them to move away. 
If they will not move, they move them, and if they resist they force them." 
This he asserted was only done in cases when great provocation had been re- 
ceived, and he insisted that politics had little to do with the operations of the 
Klan. Carelessly dropping his reserve, the Kentuckian added : " We don't do 
anything wrong; we simply correct those who don't behave right," thus uncon- 
sciously intimating that he himself was one of the Knights of the "Invisible 
Empire." 







A Country Blacksmith Shop. 



LXXVIII. 



THE TRADE OF LOUISVILLE. 



THE trade of Louisville,, long dwarfed by the oppressive slave system to 
which Kentucky was utterly devoted, and which prevented the growth 
of large manufacturing towns, is gradually springing into vigorous life. Louis- 
ville has long been one of the most important tobacco markets in the United 
States. Situated near the centre of the largest tobacco- growing district of the 
country, with an admirable system of railroad connections North and South, 
and a noble water outlet, she has superior facilities for this branch of trade. The 
bulk of the staple raised in Ken- 
tucky, the chief tobacco - growing 
State of the Union, is sold in the 
Louisville market. The Kentucky 
crop for 1 87 1 amounted to 66,000 
hogsheads, of which nearly 50,000 
were sold in Louisville. Buyers for 
American and foreign markets reside 
permanently in the city, and those 
European Governments which have 
found it wise to enjoy a monopoly of 
their home tobacco trade are repre- 
sented by local agents who make 
their purchase from the planters. 
Thousands of whites and blacks 
are employed in the huge ware- 
houses, and nineteen factories, with a 
capital of 850,000 dollars, are engaged in the manufacture of chewing tobacco. 
The city also produces twelve millions of cigars annually. In the whiskey trade 
a large capital is invested. From the distilleries in the Blue Grass region 
thousands of barrels, filled with the fluid which prompts so large a proportion 
of the homicides in the State, are brought to Louisville, and it is said that 
the transactions amount to five millions annually. Pork-packers also make the 
city their head- quarters, and in the sixty days of each year between November 
and January a million swine pass through their hands. 

As a live-stock market, Louisville has been rapidly growing in importance for 
many years. The stock-yards there now cover twenty acres, and the value of 
the stock received annually is between twenty and thirty millions. The flour- 
mills yearly yield a product worth four millions. The trade in provisions ag- 
gregates from eleven to fifteen millions ; the annual product of iron foots up five 




The Court -House — Louisville. 



7o8 



PROSPECTIVE GROWTH. 



millions, and more than 1,500 hands are employed in the manufacture of iron 

work, while in the foundries 500 hands are employed. In brief, the amount 

of capital invested in manufacturing enterprises in the city is about twenty 

^^^^ , millions, the annual product fifty - 

five millions, the number of hands 
employed 16,000, and the amount 
of wages paid eight millions. 

Louisville would be an admirable 
point for the establishment of cotton- 
mills, and as its capitalists have had 
their attention favorably directed to 
the large dividends which Southern 
mills are yearly paying, it is hoped 
that the city may speedily secure 
several mills. The building of 
steamboats for the Western waters 
has long been one of the leading 
industries of Louisville and the 
villages clustered about the Falls of 
the Ohio. The water power of the 
Ohio Falls is very remarkable, and 
ought to place Louisville among the 
first manufacturing cities of the 
country. It has thus far been but 
little utilized. The same negligent and reckless spirit which pervaded others 
of the slave States in regard to the improvement of natural advantages con- 
trolled the Kentuckian mind, and 
was even more pronounced in Louis- 
ville and its vicinity than in many 
places further south. The law of 
Kentucky, which allowed only six 
per cent, interest, was an effectual 
barrier to the investment of foreign 
capital in Louisville, and drove away 
much local capital which might have 
been invested. The enlargement of 
the present Louisville and Portland 
canal, which was completed in 1828 
at a cost of $750,000, would render 
transportation to and from Louisville 
more feasible ; and the building of a 
new canal through Portland town 
would furnish a superb location, 
with enormous water power for miles of factories and mills. ■ The Louisville 
and Nashville railroad gives a grand trunk line from Louisville to Montgomery, 




The Cathedral — Louisville. 




The Post- Office — Louisville. 



ITS RAILWAY CONNECTIONS. 



709 



Alabama, a distance of 490 miles, and connection with the railroad system 
of the Southern States, which are Kentucky's chief market. Louisville is 
also connected by the Great Bridge spanning the Ohio, with all the rail- 
roads north of that river, and is directly on the through route from the north 
and west to the extreme south. The main trunk of the Louisville and Nash- 
ville railroad extends through Jefferson, Bullett, Nelson, Hardin, Larue, Hart, 
Edmondson, Barren, Warren, and Simpson counties. Branch railroads, connect- 
ing with Memphis and South-eastern Kentucky, have served largely to develop 
the regions through which they run. The so-called Richmond branch runs to 
within a short distance of the richest iron region of the State. The Eliza- 
bethtown and Paducah railroad extends from Elizabethtown, on the Louisville 
and Nashville railroad, forty-two miles from Louisville, to Paducah, a thriving 
city on the Ohio, fifty miles from its junction with the Mississippi. Paducah 
is the commercial market of Western Kentucky. The Owensboro, Russelville 
and Nashville, the Evansville, Hen- 
derson and Nashville, the Paducah 
and Memphis, and the Nashville and 
Ohio roads also traverse Western 
Kentucky. The last-named route 
gives an important connection with 
the city of Mobile. 

Louisville has connection with the 
eastern section of the State and Cin- 
cinnati, by the Louisville, Frankfort 
and Lexington, and the Short Line, 
railroads. The former runs through 
Frankfort, the charming capital of 
Kentucky, to the staid and solid old 
city of Lexington, which is the 
western terminus of the Big Sandy 
railroad. This road passes through 
some of the finest agricultural dis- 
tricts of the State, pierces the very 
heart of the mineral region of 
Kentucky, and is designed to furnish connection with the Atlantic ports via 
the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad through Western Virginia. 

At Lagrange, twenty-eight miles from Louisville, the Short Line railroad to 
Covington, opposite Cincinnati, on the Ohio river, crosses the Louisville, Frank- 
fort and Lexington road. The Kentucky Central railroad runs through Middle 
Kentucky, and from Paris, in the Blue Grass region, the Maysville and Lexing- 
ton road branches out. 

Many new railroads are chartered in Kentucky, and of those most likely soon 
to be built, the Cincinnati Southern, intended to furnish a line from Covington, 
on the Ohio, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and to pursue a central route through 
Middle Kentucky, is the most prominent. The Ohio and Cumberland railroad, 




The City Hall — Louisville. 



yio 



BANKS TAXATION — CREDIT. 




George D. Prentice — (From a Painting' in the Louisville 
Public Library). 



as projected, will run from Covington to Nashville, in Tennessee, and the Louis- 
ville, Memphis, and New Orleans road is intended to pierce from Louisville 
through rich agricultural and mineral districts, and intersecting important lines 

of rail, to Union City, where it will 
connect with routes tributary to Mem- 
phis. The railroads that are already 
completed in Kentucky penetrate sixty- 
one counties, and the majority of them 
contribute directly to the prosperity of 
Louisville. In addition to these, as a 
means of distributing its manufactured 
wares, that city has the advantage of 
navigable streams, embracing an extent 
of 16,000 miles. 

The capital stock at present invested 
in banks and banking houses in Louis- 
ville is about ten millions, and the 
deposit capital amounts to more than 
eight millions. In addition to these 
amounts, Louisville has many private 
capitalists. The law of Kentucky now 
allows ten per cent, interest upon loans, 
and it is probable that capital from all sections of the Union will flow to 
Louisville within the next few years. The bonded debt of the city was 
$6,153,509 in 1872, and the taxable property of the city is estimated at 
$80,000,000. The credit of the city is 
excellent; the taxation is not burden- 
some ; the municipal government is 
good. There are few better lighted, 
better paved, or better policed towns 
than Louisville. For a community 
where three-fourths of the male citi- 
zens habitually bear arms, shooting 
is reasonably rare, although not 
properly punished when, under the 
influence of liquor or passion, it does 
occur. The city spreads over thirteen 
square miles, a space amply sufficient 
to furnish dwellings for a population 
of half a million. Building is cheap, 
tenement houses are rare, and although 
a motley gang of rough men from the 
rivers is gathered in some quarters of the city, but little lawlessness prevails. 
The public buildings of Louisville are not architecturally fine. The City Hall 
is the most ambitious structure, and the council-room in which the municipal 




The Colored Normal School — Louisville. 



EDIFICES CHURCHES GEORGE D. PRENTICE. 



711 



fathers discuss popular measures is palatial. The Court- House on Jefferson 
street, the Louisville University Medical College, the Blind Asylum, the male 
and female High Schools, the Custom -House and Post- Office and Masonic 
Temple are solid and substantial edifices. In autumn and in winter, fogs hover 
over the city, and the coal smoke, joined to the mists, colors the walls of houses 
with the same brown so noticeable in London and St. Louis. The Cathedral on 
Walnut street, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, and the First Presbyterian, opposite 
it, are fine houses of worship. Louisville boasts accommodation for 50,000 
worshipers, and amongst its noteworthy divines is the Rev. Dr. Stuart Robinson, 
whose Confederate predilections during the war were strongly marked, and whose 






.' J : 



Jit? 




"--. 



m? W-'3 - - - --■'?■-*■■■ ■.-;_■«. : ,. ■;- 

■■,..■ ...... , 

Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, from the New Albany Heights. 

ability is unquestionable. The new Public Library at present occupies a small 
and commodious building, soon to be replaced, when the drawings of the Lottery 
are completed, by a finer structure. This library, although at present no larger 
than those in many New England cities one-third the size of Louisville, is ad- 
mirably selected, finely officered, and contains, among other curiosities, a painting 
of George D. Prentice, as he appeared in middle-life. The celebrated journalist, 
poet and politician, lies beside his son, who was killed while in the ranks of the 
Confederates, in Cave Hill cemetery, near the city. 

The schools of Louisville merit great praise. The public school system is 
taking a firm hold there, and even the " Steel Blue " tendencies of the majority 



712 



SCHOOLS — SCENERY. 



of the population, and their refusal to believe in the ultimate elevation of the 
222,000 blacks in the State, have not hindered them from supplying the colored 
population with excellent facilities for education. Louisville has two high schools, 
which are,. in every respect, first-class seminaries, twenty-three ward schools, and 
a host of private institutions for English and classical training. The school build- 
ings will seat 12,000 pupils. Nearly three-quarters of a million is invested in 
school buildings and lots, and $150,000 is annually paid in salaries. The German 
language is taught as one of the regular branches in the public schools, a measure 
rendered necessary, as in St. Louis, by the influx of the Teutonic population. The 
Colored Normal School building, dedicated in Louisville last year, is probably the 
finest public school edifice designed for the instruction of negroes in the country. 
The School Board has established training departments in connection with some 
of the ward schools, and these are rapidly equipping teachers. 

Although there is no impressive scenery in the vicinity of Louisville, the 
green lowlands, the wide river, and the vast expanse of wooded plain are very 
imposing. From the hills back of New Albany, on the Indiana shore, one can 
look down on the huge extent of Louisville half-hidden beneath the foliage which 
surrounds so many of its houses ; can note the steamers slowly winding about 
the bends in the Ohio, or carefully working their way up to the broad levees ; 
can see the trains crawling like serpents over the high suspended bridge, and the 
church spires and towers gleaming under the mellow sunlight. In a few years, 
if the improvements now in progress are continued, Louisville will be one of the 
most delightful of American cities. 




LXXIX. 



FRANKFORT — THE BLUE GRASS REGION- 
LEXINGTON. 



•ALEXANDER'S FARM. 



NOWHERE is the Kentucky river more beautiful than where it flows past the 
pretty and cultured town of Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, sixty miles 
above its entrance into the Ohio. For many miles in every direction superb 
landscapes are spread out before the traveler's vision. He will have found the 
ride of sixty-five miles from Louisville a constant panorama of fine fields, well- 




Frankfort, on the Kentucky River. 



Their solid building and 



kept farms, stone-fenced and thoroughly cultivated 
general air of thrift offers a sharp contrast to the scraggy sheds and unpainted 
mansions of Southern plantations. In the train the traveler will find the typical 
Kentuckian, tall, smooth-faced, with clear complexion, and bright eyes, his man- 
ners deferential, and his conversation enjoyable. In the manners of the better 
class of Kentuckians there is no familiarity, no grossness or coarseness, but a 
frankness only slightly tinged with formality. 



714 



THE CEMETERY VIEW FROM IT. 



We arrived at Frankfort at nightfall, and were ushered by an attentive negro 
into a great stone caravansary known as the Capitol Hotel, which, during the 
sessions of the Legislature, is crowded, but for the remainder of the year is almost 
empty. In the morning, while a delicious haze, through which the sun was 

striving to peep, overhung the 
hills, we walked through the 
still streets bordered with 
pretty mansions, and stole 
along the steep and picturesque 
banks of the Kentucky to the 
cemetery, perched on a high 
bluff, where stands the monu- 
ment above the grave of Daniel 
Boone. Clambering up to this 
lovely spot by a flight of 
ancient stone steps, and passing 
the crags known as Umbrella 
and Boone rocks, we paused 
from time to time, fascinated 
with the beauty of the tranquil 
stream hundreds of feet below 
us, its banks fringed with love- 
liest foliage and trees. On the 

The Ascent to Frankfort Cemetery, Kentucky. river lay mOOred °Teat raftS 

of logs which had been drifted down from the mountain torrents above. 

Frankfort lies in a deep valley surrounded by sharply- defined hills, the river 
there flowing between high limestone banks, from which is quarried the admi- 
rable building stone of which the town is partially constructed. From the 
cemetery bluff the town looks as picturesque as an Italian city. Clustered 
together on the river-bank the wide buildings form a group which has none 
of the unpleasant angles so common in America. The village of South Frank- 
fort is connected with the main town by a covered bridge over the stream, and in 
all directions smooth, wide, macadamized roads stretch out over the hills and 
through the ravines. Near the city there are many fine estates, on which the 
noted horses and cattle of the Blue Grass regions are raised. The State Arsenal 
is an unimposing building on a pretty eminence. The ruins of the old State 
Capitol occupy a conspicuous elevation, and the new State- House, now in process 
of completion, stands on a handsome lawn. The Penitentiary — where, at the 
time of our visit, 700 convicts, equally divided among whites and blacks, were 
engaged in manufacturing hemp into matting — is an unpicturesque structure, 
whose high walls have not prevented the occasional escape of prisoners. Each 
convict is compelled to weave 150 yards of matting daily, and, after his task 
is completed, is allowed to repose until nightfall, when he is locked up in 
his cell. We saw several of the blacks improving their time by reading, but 
most of the prisoners who had finished their daily toil were sullenly chewing 




THE PENITENTIARY KU-KLUX. 



715 



tobacco, and contemplating the gloomy walls of the dark rooms in which they 
had been working. The keepers of the Penitentiary regaled us with stories of 
adventurous people who in the old days had been confined for negro stealing. 
In the Hospital we saw a fine athletic man crouching over a table with his head 
held wearily behind his hands. This was the forger Atwood, whose reckless folly 
brought him from the centre of a brilliant society to a term of twenty years in jail. 

Manufacturing is creeping into the capital, although prominent society neither 
seeks nor cares for it. Farming, the distilling of pure whiskeys from the golden 
grain which grows so abundantly in the vicinity, the breeding and care of race- 
horses, and visiting and junketing in all the country side, content the Kentucki- 
ans. Aside from the stir created by the assemblage of politicians there is but 
little thus far to trouble the dreamy repose and enviable tranquillity by which 
Frankfort is characterized. It is the home of many of the loveliest women in 
the country, and its society is largely represented in all the cities of the world. 
Its belles, and those of Lexington, lead the fashion at the Southern " Springs." 

While we were at Frankfort the Ku-Klux were engaged in active operations 
in the neighboring counties, and the residents of Frankfort denounced them as a 
band of ruffians whose main object 
was revenge. One gentleman asserted 
that he would at any time help with his 
own hands to lynch a certain member 
of the gang, if he could be caught. In 
Owen and Henry counties these mid- 
night marauders had inaugurated a 
veritable reign of terror. They took 
"niggers" from their houses and 
whipped them on most trivial provo- 
cation. They waylaid those who had 
dared to testify against them in court, 
and " fixed" them from behind bushes. 
Clad in fantastic disguises, they hov- 
ered about the confines of large 
towns, carrying dread into the hearts 
of superstitious blacks. The colored 
people living in the outskirts of 
Frankfort had deserted their homes 
and flocked into the town, giving as 
their reason that they were afraid of 
the Ku-Klux. It is hardly fair to 
presume that political bitterness has 
been so much concerned in prompting the actions of these prowlers as have 
ignorance and the general lawlessness — all too prevalent in the back-country 
of Kentucky. 

Between Louisville and Frankfort, at La Grange, a branch road diverges to 
Shelbyville. This pretty town stands in the midst of a luxuriantly fertile country, 

46 




-'".-V.; 

.Ink 

__ Wmlma 



CI 






\?vi{T? A: - 



The Monument to Daniel Boone in the Cemetery at 
Frankfort, Kentucky. 



yi6 



SHELBYVILLE HARRODSBURG SPRINGS DOCTOR GRAHAM. 



has many manufactories, a fine court-house, numerous churches, three flourishing- 
seminaries, and is the seat of Shelby College, founded in 1836. Thirty miles 
below Frankfort, on an eminence near the far-famed Salt river, so well known in 
political jargon, is Harrodsburg, the oldest settlement in the State, where Captain 
James Harrod, in 1774, erected a cabin in the wilderness. Harrodsburg has been 
visited by thousands from East and West, and it is to-day the most famous sum- 
mer resort in the State, its mineral springs being a prime attraction. It is also 
the seat of old Bacon College and a good military academy. In 18 19 Christo- 
pher Graham went to Harrodsburg with a few dollars in his pocket, and for 
thirty-two years thereafter was the patron of the springs, bringing into the 
State more than $4,000,000, the expenditure of visitors from all parts of the 
world. The Presbyterian Female College and the Christian Baptist College 




View on the Kentucky River, near Frankfort. 

at Harrodsburg owe their existence to Doctor Graham. He also created and 
paved, at his own expense, the first street in the town. In three decades, and 
by his own exertions, he so beautified this lovely spot that when Generals Scott 
and Wool were delegated by Congress to prepare an asylum in the West for 
invalid soldiers, they bought a site at Harrodsburg for $100,000, and built on it 
a fine edifice, which was long ago burned. 

Nine miles from Frankfort, on the road to Lexington, stands one of the finest 
and richest farms in Kentucky — that owned by Mr. Alexander. On this superb 
stock-farm we saw 300 blooded horses, ranging in rank from old " Lexington,"' 
the monarch of the turf, to the kittenish and frisky yearling. Here also Mr. Alex- 
ander has collected $100,000 worth of cattle, comprising some of the finest stock 
in the world. Peeping into the inclosure where the costly cattle were kept, 
we saw one diminutive heifer worth $27,000, and a variety of foreign creatures 



MR. ALEXANDER'S FARM JOHN HARPER S. 



717. 



whose value seemed almost fabulous. On this farm are bred the great majority 
of the fine trotting and running horses which appear in our parks during the 
racing season. Mr. Alexander's estate, which is admirably stocked with fine 
farm-houses, barns and stables, and is more like a ducal manor than the 
ordinary American farm, extends over 3,200 acres. Near by is old John 
Harper's modest farm of 2,000 acres. The roads, the stone walls, and the fine 
lawns covered with massive shade- trees, make a series of delightful pictures. 







Asteroid Kicks Up. 



The annual sale of horses on the Alexander farm occurs in June. Only yearling 
colts are sold. Hundreds of people from all the country around, and from 
every State in the Union, 'flock to this sale. An immense barbecue is held, and 
high wassail marks the conclusion of the occasion. 

We paid a respectful visit to old " Lexington," the mighty sire of a mightier 
equine family. He is now quite blind, a veteran of twenty- two, afflicted with 
goitre, and stood gazing in the direction from which our voices came, a melan- 
choly wreck of his former greatness. The princes of the race-course of the 
present galloped by, neighing and pawing the ground, as if annoyed at our 
presence. One of them, named "Asteroid," so far forgot his princely dignity as 
to charge incontinently upon the fence where we were seated, and the artist has 
depicted the result in a spirited sketch. The negro men who manage these 
erratic brutes undergo all sorts of perilous adventures, but they seem to possess 
as many lives as a cat, and, like that animal, always land on their feet, no matter 
how far the plunging and rearing horses may throw them. 

Except the negligence of her people with regard to their own interests, and 
the prejudices which still, in many quarters, survive the death of the slavery 
regime, there is no reason why Kentucky should not already have received a 
mighty current of immigration. Rich in all the elements of material greatness, 
abounding in mineral and agricultural lands, noble rivers, and superb forests, it is 



^ 1 8 THE BLUE GRASS REGION LEXINGTON. 

astonishing that great wealth is not more general among the people of the State. 
Lying between 39 and 36 30' north latitude, her climate is delightful, and her 
situation, between the two greatest water-sheds of the continent, affords her easy 
communication with twelve of the largest and wealthiest of her sister States. 

The Green, the Kentucky, and the Barren rivers are all navigable, and run 
through regions which can readily furnish them an immense commerce. The 
area of the State is 37,700 square miles, the larger part of which is more than 
eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. The farming region, in Middle 
Kentucky, which includes the territory between the mountains of the east and 
the lower lands lying west of the Louisville and Nashville railroad, and extend- 
ing from the northern to the southern boundary, is superb. Within this tract 
of ten thousand square miles all the cereals, hemp, flax, and every kind of vege- 
table and fruit flourish magnificently. In Middle Kentucky lies the famous 
"Blue Grass Region," of which I have already spoken, which has long been 
noted for its beautiful women, its Bourbon whiskey and Bourbon Democrats, its 
Lexingtons and Asteroids, its Alexanders, and its " Old John Harper." Fay- 
ette, Bourbon, Scott, Woodford, Clark, Jessamine, and portions of other counties 
in this region, owe much to the beds of blue shell limestone and marble which 
underlie them, the upper soil, which is a dark loam with a red clay subsoil, 
being astonishingly fertile. These fair lands are carpeted throughout the year 
with a brilliant blue grass. Even in midwinter a deep green clothes the soil, 
and, when summer comes, the grass sends up slender shafts to the height of 
several feet, crowned with feathery tufts of a bright blue color. The effect of 
a landscape clad in this noble herbage, and dotted here and there with fine oaks 
and well-kept farm-houses, is exceedingly fine. Throughout Fayette, Woodford, 
Scott, and Bourbon counties, lands are worth from $80 to $140 per acre, and 
highly-cultivated farms of from 250 to 300 acres are abundant. There hemp 
yields from eight to fourteen hundred pounds per acre, and tobacco flourishes 
even on the second-rate lands. Montgomery county is interspersed with fields 
and meadows, studded with stately forests in which the blue grass grows as luxu- 
riantly as in the cleared lands. In the forest pastures are bred the magnificent 
cattle and horses for which Kentucky is so famous. The chief advantage which 
the Blue Grass region possesses over any other in the State is in its unequaled 
pasturage, and in the richness of its timber-lands. From it are annually exported 
thousands of noble horses and cattle, and immense droves of sheep, mules and 
hogs are sent to the cotton-fields of the South. 

Lexington, one of the most wealthy and beautiful of Kentucky cities, is 
charmingly situated on the lower fork of the Elkhorn river. The early pioneers 
and adventurers, who established the town in the midst of a wilderness, found 
there the remains of a great fortress and a mighty people whose history has not 
been written. The present city is built above the ruins of mounds and fortifica- 
tions, totally different from those erected by the Indians, and evidently of great 
extent and magnificence. A few years before the first prominent white settle- 
ment was made there, the entrance to an ancient catacomb was discovered by 
some hunters, and embalmed bodies were found in it. For three-quarters of a 



ORIGIN OF ITS NAME ITS FOUNDER. 



719 



century the entrance to this subterranean cemetery has been hidden, and the 
Kentuckians of to-day even doubt its existence. Lexington was the starting- 
point of Kentucky and the centre from which radiated all the movements that 
finally ended in the conquering of the savage and the domination by the whites 
in the West. In 1775, the hunters from Harrodsburg took possession of the north 
side of the Kentucky river, and the place where they first halted was near 
Lexington. A spring from which they drank is still pointed out. The town was 
named after Lexington in Massachusetts by the hunters, into whose forest retreat 




A Souvenir of Kentucky. 

the news had crept that King George's troops, on the 19th of April, had shot 
down the American rebels in Massachusetts colony at Lexington. Kentucky was 
then a wild territory, belonging to the royal province of Virginia, and it is not a 
little strange that there, in the midst of an unbroken forest, was raised the first 
monument to the first dead of the American Revolution. 

The founder of Lexington was Colonel Robert Patterson, the compeer of 
Boone, Kenton, and other forest pioneers whose names are famous. For half a 



720 



ASHLAND THE UNIVERSITY. 



century after its foundation, Lexington had a brilliant history. To-day it is a 
quiet town, the home of many wealthy families and the Mecca of thousands of 
pilgrims, as it contains the old residence and the grave of Henry Clay. A 
monument to the illustrious statesman stands in the beautiful cemetery of Lex- 
ington, on an eminence near the centre of the grounds, and is a landmark for 
miles around. It was completed in i860, at a cost of $50,000. 

" Ashland," the old Clay homestead, is situated a mile and a-half from the 
city, in the midst of beautiful parks, closely resembling the manors of Eng- 
land. During Mr. Clay's lifetime the estate was ornamented with loveliest shade- 
trees and orchards in profusion, and the road which leads to the mansion, now 
the residence of Regent Bowman, of the Kentucky University, is lined with 
locusts, cypresses, and cedars, through which peep the rose, the jessamine, and the 
ivy. The old mansion, replaced in 1857 by a beautiful modern residence, was 
a plain, unpretending structure, in which Mr. Clay at various times had enter- 
tained a host of distinguished Americans and foreigners. Lexington is also 
the location of the Kentucky University and the State Lunatic Asylum ; the 
former institution, founded on the ruins of Transylvania University, has an 
endowment of $500,000, a fine library, and its law and medical schools have 
long been renowned. The present University was incorporated in 1858, its 
original endowment having been obtained by the efforts of the present Regent, 
John B. Bowman, a native of Kentucky, who was also instrumental in the con- 
solidation of the Universities of Harrodsburg, Transylvania, and the Agricultural 
College at Lexington. The first session of the Kentucky University was in 
1865, and the grounds of the Agricultural and Mechanical College, which now 
comprise "Ashland," and the adjoining estate of "Woodlands " were purchased 
in 1866. 




A little Adventure by the Wayside. 



LXXX. 

POLITICS IN KENTUCKY — MINERAL RESOURCES OF THE STATE. 

POLITICAL questions in Kentucky have lately been more agitated than for 
many years since the war. The discussion of the Civil Rights bill has 
been as furious and illogical there as in any other of the ex-slave States. The 
freedmen do not constitute a troublesome element in the commonwealth. There 
are 222,000 of them, while the whole population of the State is 1,331,000 souls. 
Some of the oldest and stififest Bourbon Democrats have of late shown gratifying 
tendencies toward liberality in educational matters, and, indeed, it may with 
reason be hoped that Kentucky will soon be ranked among the progressive 
States which desire immigration, education, and manufactures, — the three things 
which alone can build up States once consecrated to slavery. 

A brief sketch of the progress of Kentucky politics may not be uninterest- 
ing. Kentucky was a Whig State, faithful to Henry Clay as long as he lived, 
and a worshiper of his theories after* he died. The Whig feeling is still very 
strong among some of the older voters. A prominent editor in the State told 
me that he could remember when it was not good ton to be a Democrat, just as 
since the war it has not been fashionable to be a Republican. When the Whig 
party died, after Scott's defeat, the masses of the Whigs went into the Know- 
Nothing movement, and the Democrats opposed it, although, during the battle, 
a good many Whigs and Democrats changed sides. In the Fillmore and Bu- 
chanan canvass, the State sided with Buchanan, and the Know-Nothing party 
died. 

Then the Whigs, still unwilling to coincide with the Democrats, formed what 
was called the Opposition Party, and, in 1859, ran Bell for Governor against 
McGoffin, who was a Douglas Squatter-Sovereignty Democrat; but Bell, for the 
purpose of making political capital, took extreme views with regard to the rights 
of the South in the territories, and compelled McGoffin to come on to his 
ground. This, it is considered, was very unfortunate in its effect on the temper 
of the State. 

When the Secession movement came up, eighteen months afterward, it had a 
good deal to do with creating the neutrality position taken by the leading men 
■of the State, in the winter of i860, as a measure of necessity for holding the 
masses of the people steady for a time against the wave of Secession excitement. 
The division of the Democrats between Breckenridge and Douglas, in i860, gave 
the State to Bell and Everett. The Douglas men were nearly all Unionists. 
When the Southern States began the Secession movement, after the election of 
Mr. Lincoln, the Kentucky Legislature, which had been elected in 1859 during 



722 PARTIES — FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT. 

the excitement raised by the Bell-McGoffin canvass for the Governorship, was 
found to be nearly divided between Union men and Southern sympathizers. 

In the election of 1861, for "Peace Commissioners," Congressmen, and 
Legislators, the Union men were successful by large majorities, and they retained 
control of the State until 1 866, although it is said that the Emancipation Procla- 
mation, and the course of injudicious military commanders in the State, greatly 
weakened the Union party, which was gradually divided into unconditional 
Union men and " Union Democrats." The straight-out Democrats, mostly 
Secessionists, tried to hold a convention at Frankfort in 1862, but were pre- 
vented by the Post Commander. They sent delegates, however, to the Chicago 
Convention in 1864. Those delegates were received, and divided seats with the 
Union Democrats. The unconditional Union men, who voted for Mr. Lincoln 
in 1864 in Kentucky, formed the basis of the present Republican party in the 
State, but did not call themselves Republicans until the convention of May, 1867. 

The Union Legislature, during the war, passed an act expatriating all citizens 
who had left the State for the purpose of aiding the Confederacy. The last 
Union Legislature, in 1865 and '66 repealed this act, and welcomed the return 
of the Confederates to their allegiance. The Democratic party was organized in. 
1866, and gained possession of the county offices. The unconditional Union 
men cooperated with the Union Democrats in this canvass. The next year the 
Union men took their stand with the Republican party, and nominated a 
candidate for Governor. The Union Democrats also nominated a candidate. 
They were called before the election the " third party, " and after it, from 
their small show of strength, the "one-third party." The Democrats, em- 
bracing the Secession element, and the dissatisfied Union men, also made a 
nomination. * 

The "third party" embraced nearly all the old Union leaders, but few of 
the rank and file, and cast but 13,000 votes. A Democratic Governor was 
elected, and Secession Democrats have filled the Governor's chair ever since. 

By the adoption of the fifteenth amendment about 45,000 additional voters 
were placed upon the lists, but not more than 35,000 of them have ever voted at 
an election. The Republicans have been slowly but steadily gaining ground in 
the Legislature for some years. They are still in a small minority. Their policy 
has been to win back the old Union men from the Democracy, with whom their 
associations have not always been pleasant. It is from that source mainly that 
the Republicans have gained their strength. The Democrats are divided up by 
lines which cross one another in a variety of ways, into the " Stay-at-home sym- 
pathizers," the Confederate soldiers, the Bourbons, and the "Progressives." The 
Stay-at-homes have repeatedly concluded that the Confederates were too grasp- 
ing, and the Bourbons have shriekingly accused the Progressives of infidelity to 
party. The balance of power has swayed in every direction ; but the Bourbons 
and Confederates now control the State. The feeling that the Democratic party 
of Kentucky was in many respects an " unreconciled " party, and that it sanc- 
tioned the lawlessness of the Ku-Klux, has led the Republicans to adhere to the 
national organization of their oarty, without paying much attention to the ques- 



FREE SCHOOLS PUBLIC DEBT. 723 

tions which have caused dissension among Northern Republicans. They still 
regard the predominance of the Republican party in national affairs as more im- 
portant to them than the justification of party measures. If the negro question 
were out of the politics of the State, there would be no trouble on account of the 
old Union and Secession differences. The feeling in relation to it had been toned 
down to a manageable point, when the discussion of the Civil Rights bill revived 
it in all its old bitterness and intensity. 

The Progressives in the Democratic party have among them individuals who 
take strong ground in favor of general education, but the opposition to common 
schools among the wealthier classes is very powerful. The first law for the estab- 
lishment of a general system of common schools in Kentucky was enacted in 
1838, but the continued war made upon it disgusted the friends of the move- 
ment, and they did but little for many years thereafter. In 1867 a series of liberal 
reforms in the then prostrate school system was planned, and a bill inaugurating 
the reform finally passed the Legislature in 1869—70. The result of the opera- 
tion of the new law was the doubling of the number of children in the common, 
schools, and a general advance in education throughout the State. The Board 
of Education is composed of the Attorney- General, the Secretary of State, and 
the Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

While it may be said that there are free schools in most of the districts in. 
Kentucky, it is evident that many of them are but poorly sustained for a few 
months in the year, and are not patronized enough by the influential classes to 
give them vitality and value. All the populous and flourishing towns have high 
schools and private academies, and the many colleges, either sectarian or estab- 
lished by private enterprise, receive the youth who, in other States, are educated 
in public schools. Outside of the cities, although some provision is made for the 
education of the colored children, the whites feel but little interest in it, and 
Berea College, in the mountain district, is probably the only mixed college in the 
State. An address recently made by Colonel Stodart Johnson, of Kentucky,, 
containing a strong plea for educational progress, excited considerable unfriendly 
criticism. 

The public debt of Kentucky is but a trifling sum, and the " powers that be " 
are very scrupulous with regard to incurring liabilities, — so much so that they 
begrudge the money which might be expended in furthering the State's, interest. 
The total State tax, at present, is forty-five cents on one hundred dollars, and 
real estate is rarely assessed at more than half its value. 

Eastern Kentucky may be said to be one immense bed of coal and iron. The 
territory of the State extends over much of the area of two of the largest and 
richest coal-fields on the continent. The great Appalachian coal-field extends 
through its eastern section, and extensive coal-measures are found, and have 
been worked, in a score of the eastern counties. This coal-field embraces 
nearly all the mountain counties drained by the Big Sandy river, the Kentucky 
above its forks, and the Cumberland above its shoals. The upper coal-measures 
of this eastern coal-field embrace very rich beds, containing from sixty to 
sixty-three per cent, of fixed carbon. The yield of the entire region is rich,, 



724 IRON ORES COAL IN WESTERN KENTUCKY. 

averaging from fifty-eight to sixty-three per cent. Coal crops out along the 
banks of the Big Sandy river, and is easily worked and readily transportable to 
market. On the Kentucky and Cumberland fine workable beds of coal are also 
found. The iron ore is always closely associated with coal. Iron-furnaces might 
be established with profit throughout the entire group of mountain counties, from 
the Big Sandy to the level lands of Middle Kentucky, and from the Ohio river to 
the Tennessee line. 

In many counties red and brown hematites and the Black Band ores, resem- 
bling those from which iron is chiefly made in Europe, are abundant. The 
minerals of Eastern Kentucky are its main resource, for the only lands of medium 
fertility are to be found along the streams. The hill-sides, from which the inhabi- 
tants dig with difficulty a scanty sustenance, are poor in quality. Mineral springs 
are scattered throughout the eastern section, and the fine climate and the lovely 
scenery of the Kentucky mountains will doubtless give them in due time the 
reputation won by those of Western and South-western Virginia. 

In Estill county, on the Red river, a small tributary of the Kentucky, is an iron 
district which has attained a world-wide reputation. The Red River Iron Works, 
located near the mouth of the stream, began operations in 1808. Rude furnaces 
were built there in that year, and the soft ores of the district were roughly con- 
verted into pig-iron. In succeeding years better furnaces were erected, and since 
the war the property has passed into the hands of a wealthy stock company, 
which now owns 60,000 acres of mineral and timber lands, and is much in need 
of railroad facilities. Another corporation, known as the Cottage Iron Company, 
also owns 13,000 acres of fine mineral land in the vicinity. These companies 
together employ a thousand workmen, and annually expend half a million dollars 
in the manufacture of metals used exclusively for car- wheels. When these 
furnaces are put in connection with the markets, by an already projected rail- 
way, the number of tons of pig-iron manufactured in the State, which in 1870 
was 37,548, will be vastly increased. 

The coal-field of Western Kentucky is seventy-five miles in length and fifty- 
five miles in width at the widest part, having an average width of perhaps forty 
miles. The Elizabethtown and Paducah railroad runs through its entire length, 
and it is traversed by several other railroads. The coal and iron ores have as 
yet been but little developed, but .will evidently repay an active mining. 
Through the southern portion of Western Kentucky there are large veins of 
lead ore said to contain considerable silver, but the operations in mining these 
ores have been very imperfect. Twelve of the western counties overlie coal- 
measures, and in Union, Henderson, and Davis counties there are many work- 
able beds of coal with an average thickness of four feet. According to the 
testimony of General Basil Duke, the richest coals of the Western Kentucky 
fields, possessing an average of more than fifty per cent, of fixed carbon, are 
found in the lower coal-measures, which in a depth of 900 feet contain ten 
workable beds having a united thickness of more than thirty feet. 

The above-mentioned counties are also exceedingly rich in agricultural 
resources. Alluvial deposits in the bottoms along the Ohio river, and the loam 



FERTILITY OF THE SOIL PRICES. 



725 






of the uplands, furnish a superb soil on which fine crops of tobacco are raised 
and the Indian corn is as large as that of the best blue grass land. All these 
counties lying along the Ohio are very fertile, and their lands command high 
prices. The counties near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, 
composed of the sediment of both streams, produce fine crops of tobacco, wheat, 
corn, and grasses. Labor and immigrants are everywhere in demand in this 
part of the State. Western Kentucky produces the great bulk of the tobacco 
crop of the State, although this staple is cultivated in many other counties. The 
farms in some portions of this section are now too large to be managed under 
the present labor system, and proprietors will occasionally sell acres which before 
the war brought $90, for $35 or $40. In the counties lying adjacent to Middle 
Kentucky small improved farms of reasonably good soil can be had at trivial 
prices. 




TENNESSEE, KENTUCKY, and the REGION DRAINED BY THE OHIO RIVER. 



LXXXI. 



NASHVILLE AND MIDDLE TENNESSEE. 



WHEN I first saw Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, its streets were 
almost deserted. The only signs of activity were at the railway stations, 
where thousands of people were crowding the trains which were to bear them 
beyond the reach of cholera. The city received a dreadful visitation of this 
destroyer in 1873, and the dispatches which brought from Memphis the accounts 
of the horrors of the yellow fever were the only news which I found in the 
papers of Nashville. But visiting the pleasant town a few months afterward, 
when the cholera had passed away, and the inhabitants had regained their 

courage, I saw plenty of life, activity, 
and industry. During my stay the 
city was visited by a furious and pro- 
tracted rain-storm which flooded the 
lower part of the town, and raised the 
Cumberland river, which at Nashville 
flows between high banks, so that a 
disastrous inundation was feared. 
Houses were set afloat, negroes were 
driven from their cabins to the streets, 
and poverty and distress were great. 

Nashville was once one of the most 
famous towns in the United States. 
Its men and women were noted for their 
wit and beauty, — qualities which are 
conspicuous to-day, but which have not 
been so prominent in the society of the 
National Capital as previous to 1835. The town is situated on the left bank of the 
Cumberland river, a little north of the centre of the State. It is founded almost 
literally upon a rock, the river-bluffs rising nearly eighty feet above low water 
mark. The city stretches along irregular and gradual slopes, and is picturesquely 
grouped around Capitol Hill, on which stands the State- House, one of the most 
elegant public buildings in the country. From its beautiful porticoes one may 
look over the wide expanse of plain dotted with groups of houses ; over the high 
trestle-works on which run the railways leading toward Memphis ; or may gaze 
upon the winding Cumberland, along whose banks the high business blocks are 
not ungracefully packed ; or out to the hill on which stand the ruins of Fort 
Negley, a remnant of the fierce siege during the war. 




The Tennessee State Capitol, at Nashville. 



NASHVILLE PROXIMITY TO COAL-FIELDS. 



727 



The Capitol is built of laminated limestone, which softens by exposure to the 
air, and some of the stones are already beginning to show signs of exfoliation. 
On the streets near the Capitol I saw gangs of negro convicts from the State 
Penitentiary, which is situated in the city, working at street and wall making, 
while guards with cocked rifles kept constant watch over them. 

Nashville now has about 40,000 population, and is rapidly growing in wealth 
and commercial importance. Its receipts of cotton annually amount to nearly 
100,000 bales ; it has a large trade in leaf tobacco, which comes from the adjacent 
counties ; its provision trade is with the far South, and is very extensive. Its 
sales of dry goods annually amount to about four million dollars. It also deals 
very extensively in liquor. The flouring- mills in the city and vicinity manufac- 
ture 450,000 barrels of flour and 1,200,000 barrels of meal annually. The 
Southerner has a marked fondness for Tennessee whiskey, and Nashville sends 
the favorite beverage into every Southern State. During the year 1873 the sales 
amounted to more than one hundred thousand barrels. Nashville is also a 




View from the State Capitol, Nashville, Tennessee. 

central point for drovers, and thousands of cattle, sheep, and swine are yearly 
sent down from the great Blue Grass region to be marketed at the capital. The 
whole trade of the town amounts to more than fifty millions yearly, and this will 
probably soon be doubled by the rapid increase of the coal trade and manu- 
facturing and mechanical interests. 

Three coal-fields are easily accessible from the town. One lies along the 
Nashville and Chattanooga railroad, the second is drained by the upper Cumber- 
land river, and the third, that of Western Kentucky, is penetrated by the 
St. Louis and South-eastern railroad. Six important railways centre in Nashville. 
The Louisville and Nashville, and Nashville and Decatur roads, consolidated, 
give a route from the Ohio river through the Tennessee capital to the junction 
with the road leading, by the Memphis and Charleston line, to Memphis. The 
Nashville and Chattanooga road runs through the loveliest mountain scenery in 
the South to Chattanooga. The Tennessee and Pacific road extends to Lebanon 



728 



CUMBERLAND RIVER EDGEFIELD DAVIDSON COUNTY. 



in Tennessee, and the St. Louis and South-eastern line gives a direct route via 
Henderson, Kentucky, and Evansville, Indiana, to St. Louis. Other roads are 
now under contract, and are opening up the entire country of Middle Tennessee. 
The Cumberland river, upon whose banks are many flourishing towns, is 
navigable for nine months in the year, and large quantities of coal and lumber 
are floated down to Nashville during high water. The value of the exports and 
imports along this river exceeds ten million dollars yearly, and if the improve- 
ments could be effected which are needed to render it thoroughly navigable, even 
at an expense of four or five million dollars, the trade would doubtless be 
quadrupled. Little has been done since Andrew Jackson's time to construct the 
necessary dams and deepen the channel of the stream. 

In North Nashville stands one of the largest cotton factories in the country. 
Although it has been established but a short time, the annual dividends of the 
company amount to twelve per cent. Factory-hands receive but little more 
than five dollars weekly, and the cheapness of cotton and labor enabled the 
proprietors last year not only to issue bonds which are at par in financial 
circles, but to declare a net profit of more than forty thousand dollars. Nashville 
is making an effort to secure the establishment of other cotton factories within 
her limits. 

At Edgefield, across the Cumberland, there are many prosperous manufac- 
tories ; and many Nashville people, finding that the neighboring town has thus far 
enjoyed complete immunity from cholera, have built handsome residences there 

The Nashville people, during the visi- 
tation of their. town by the plague, ac- 
cepted the suggestion that Edgefield 
escaped the scourge because its inhab- 
itants drank only cistern water; but 
this cannot be the case, as the water 
procured for Nashville by her fine 
system of water -works can hardly 
be inferior to that used in Edgefield. 
Davidson county, in which the 
capital is situated, is highly pros- 
perous. Manufacturing establish- 
ments are springing up in many 
towns ; food can be produced cheaply, 
and great quantities of coal and iron 
lie within convenient distances of 
each other. The public schools in 
Nashville are exceedingly good. 
More than 2,500 children regularly 
attend them, and the course of study, which requires ten years, and embraces 
primary, intermediate, grammar and high school departments, is admirably 
comprehensive. Nashville is likely to become a prominent educational centre 
in the South. The Vanderbilt University, the outgrowth of the magnificent 




Tomb of Ex -President Polk — Nashville, Tennessee. 



PANORAMA OF NASHVILLE STATISTICS. 



729 




"^r^--.?>-^ 



The Hermitage — General Andrew Jackson's old homestead,, 
near Nashville, Tennessee. 



donation of half a million of dollars to the Methodist Episcopal Church South,, 
by Commodore Vanderbilt, of New York, is in process of erection. The Fisk 
University, for the colored people, and several excellent seminaries for young 
ladies, have an enviable reputation. The University of Nashville, whose buildings, 
were used as a hospital during the civil 
war, has been revived, and its literary 
and - medical departments are now 
successfully conducted. 

From the suspension bridge span- 
ning the Cumberland one gets a view 
of the pretty stream, with rafts of logs 
moored along its banks ; of busy and 
prosperous Edgefield; of old Fort 
Negley's wind-swept height, and the 
many elegant streets along the hills, 
with cozy mansions and fine churches 
embowered in foliage. The market 
square is large, but there is not much 
of the picturesque activity which one 
finds in the markets further South ; so, 
also, there is less of the lounging and 
laziness which a more genial sun 
prompts in the Gulf States. The town is quiet, but not sleepy. The numerous 
daily newspapers, and the elegant book stores, than which there are no finer 
south of Baltimore, as well as a good public library, and the collection of volumes 
at the Capitol, testify to a literary taste. The society is exceedingly cordial, 
and hospitality is of the genuine Southern kind, diffuse and deferential. 

A few miles from the town, on the line of the Louisville and Nashville 
railroad, is a large national cemetery, an effective testimonial to the sharpness of 
the fighting around Nashville in 1864, when General Thomas sallied out to meet 
Hood, and in a two days' battle drove the Confederates from their intrenchments, 
following them until they escaped across the Tennessee river. 

No State is making more earnest endeavors to secure immigration than 
Tennessee. In the cars, on the steamboats, on the rivers, in the hotels, at the 
Capitol, in all public places, one hears the resources of the State earnestly- 
discussed, and no stranger is allowed to pass without giving him thorough 
information as to its splendid mineral wealth and remarkable agricultural 
facilities. 

The population of the State is at present 1,258,526, of whom 322,000 are 
colored. Over seventy-two per cent, of the people are engaged in agriculture. 
The area of improved land in the State is but small, when one considers that 
there are twenty-five millions of acres within the State limits. 

The tendency is to small farms. The entire value of the farms is more than 
$218,000,000. The total valuation of the taxable property in 1873 was 
$308,000,000, while the true valuation was probably two-fifths more. From 



73o 



CHEAPNESS OF TENNESSEE LANDS — IMMIGRATION. 



these few statistics it will be seen that Tennessee has an industrious and 
capable population, although in some parts of the State one cannot but look 
with displeasure upon the rough-riding, hard-drinking, quarrelsome folk who 
grumble at the new order of things, and spend their nights at corner-groceries, 
inveighing against "free niggers" and free schools. , 

The astonishing cheapness of land is accounted for by the want of home 
markets, of good roads, and cheap means of transportation in many sec- 
tions in the State. The war also ruined many farmers who held slaves, and 
instances have been known of the sale of estates worth $100,000 for one-fifth of 
that sum. Among the other drawbacks to farming are the want of active capital 
and of good labor. Great inducements are offered immigrants who are willing 
to work, and who have a small capital to invest; for good lands, partially 
improved, may be had in the eastern, middle, or western divisions of the State 
for from eight to thirty dollars an acre. 

Many Northern immigrants who have entered Tennessee have been disap- 
pointed because they expected to find labor less necessary than in the country 

whence they came. The winters are 
short and the products are abundant; 
but a farmer must labor in Tennessee 
as in New York or Ohio. The Secre- 
tary of the State Board of Agriculture, 
Mr. J. B. Killebrew, who has written an 
excellent book on the resources of the 
State, urges immigrants to go toTennes- 
see in colonies, as they can generally, 
by buying land together, secure it at 
much cheaper rates, and can have a 
society of their own, whereas a single 
individual settling in the back-country 
of Tennessee, among populations some- 
what ignorant, and generally prejudiced 
against innovations, would find his 
habits constantly clashing with those 
of the people around him, and would 
end by leaving in disgust. The 
impression that the better class in 
Tennessee does not respect laboring 
men is incorrect. It is becoming 
yearly more and more disgraceful to be an idler, and the influential people 
heartily welcome all who go to the State for the purpose of establishing manu- 
factures or engaging in agriculture. Outrages against persons and property are, 
on the whole, rare. In the rougher mountain regions, and some of the sections 
bordering on the Mississippi, strangers are looked upon with suspicion, and 
Northern men are considered as natural enemies ; but this by no means 
represents the feeling of the mass of the people of the State. 




Young Tennesscans. 



INDEBTEDNESS PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 



731 




Tennessee Log Cabins. 



Tennessee is gradually reducing her debt, which, in April of 1874, was 
$ 2 3. 995.337- in 1875, nearly every railroad within her boundaries will be 
liable to taxation, and, judging from the present aspects, many millions of 
dollars will be invested in the manufacture of cotton and woolen goods, and the 
development of the coal and iron-fields 
so prodigally scattered over the State. 
The Tennessee, the Cumberland, and 
numerous other rivers, serve as 
important avenues of transportation, 
and the unflagging zeal manifested by 
the State authorities in demanding the 
improvement of these streams will 
soon result in some action by the 
General Government. Western Ten- 
nessee has already more than seven 
hundred miles of rail, and had it not 
been for the financial crisis of '73, 
the mileage would have been largely 
increased. 

The public school system is not yet very efficient, although much labor has 
been expended in its enforcement by native Tennesseans. There is a positive 
objection freely expressed in many parts of Tennessee to the education of the 
negro, but the colored element in the Republican party seems quite competent 
to assert its own interests and to provide for them. The blacks are clamorous 
for many of the privileges which would be secured to them by the Civil Rights 
bill, and Congressman Maynard, their present candidate for Governor (October, 
1874), is helping them in their crusade. The permanent school fund for the 
State is more than two and one-half millions, and an additional annual income 
is derived from numerous sources. The school districts are authorized to levy 
taxes for the support of schools and the erection of buildings. As the matter 
of taxation is left to their option, the more illiberal of the districts are, of course, 
unprovided with schools. It is asserted that but thirty-five counties in the State 
have really levied a tax for school purposes. The fact that the whites are 
positively determined to provide completely separate schools for the colored 
people, and that the latter are not rich enough to supply themselves with 
schools, renders the subject a difficult and disagreeable one, especially at the 
present time. The scholastic population of the State was, in 1873, one hundred 
and seventy-three thousand. The number of teachers is insufficient, and their 
qualifications are not always of a high order. 

The Cumberland University at Lebanon has a good legal department, and 
the Presbyterians propose shortly to establish a fine University, with an endow- 
ment of half a million, which shall rival the famous institution founded by 
Vanderbilt at Nashville. 

Middle Tennessee, in which Nashville stands, is at present the most valuable 
division of the State. It contains more than half a million people, and several 

47 



732 



THE CENTRAL BASIN OF MIDDLE TENNESSEE. 



hundred prosperous towns and villages. It is one of the healthiest sections of 
America. The Cumberland, Duck, and Elk rivers flow down through deep 
gorges in the mountains, and the hundreds of small streams in the recesses 
among the hills furnish abundant water power. The variety of crops is almost 
astonishing ; wheat and fruits, tobacco, corn, cotton, and everything that grows 
above the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude, — even the fig and the magnolia, — 
can be cultivated without injury from the climate. In what is called the Central 
Basin of Middle Tennessee, as in Kentucky, much of the fine stock used in the 
Cotton States is bred; The fleet horses and the slow and laborious mules, the 
fine short-horned and Ayrshire cattle, are sought by buyers from all the States 
as the most perfect types of these animals. As a wool-growing region the basin 
has few equals and no superiors. 




Tomb of Andrew Jackson, at the "Hermitage," near Nashville. 



LXXXII. 

A GLANCE AT MARYLAND'S HISTORY — HER EXTENT AND 

RESOURCES. 



WHEN the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, found that his efforts to 
establish a colony in Newfoundland were unavailing, he visited Virginia, 
in 1628. While there, he undertook the examination of the Chesapeake, which 
John Smith had explored many years before. Journeying along the mighty 




stretch of water 200 miles from the ocean, and, 
noting its numerous tributary rivers, he doubt- 
less saw the wonderful advantages which these 
offered for colonization, and as soon as he 
returned to England he procured from Charles I. 
the promise of a grant of territory on the Chesapeake. The Virginians were not 
pleased with the prospects of the establishment of Lord Baltimore's colony, and 
took occasion to voice their discontent in the hearing of the English officials. 
Lord Baltimore died early in 1632, before the promised charter had been 
accorded ; but when it was issued it passed to his son, the second Lord Baltimore, 



734 STATE LINES DISPUTED RELIGIOUS TOLERATION. 

and "all that part of the peninsula lying in the parts of America between the 
ocean on the east and the Bay of Chesapeake on the west" was erected into a 
province and called Maryland. This was England's first province, and it was 
intended to call it Crescentia ; but Charles I., when the charter was presented for 
his signature, struck out Crescentia and substituted Maryland, in honor of his 
queen, Henrietta Maria, of France. Lord Baltimore was made absolute lord and 
proprietary of the province, giving only two Indian arrows annually, and one- 
fifth of all the gold and silver ore found within the limits of Maryland, as a 
pledge of his allegiance to the crown. The proprietary was accorded power 
to enact laws, with the advice and assent of the freemen of the province and 
their delegates. He had arbitrary power to impose taxes, and to deprive 
citizens even of life and liberty. 

The boundaries of Maryland were the occasion of much dispute in later days, 
the present limits being much less than those originally accorded the province. 
Delaware was formerly part of the territory of Maryland. The boundary between 
Maryland and Pennsylvania was disputed until Mason and Dixon drew their 
famous line between the two States in 1763 — since recognized as the dividing line 
between Northern and Southern territory and sentiment. Virginia also revived 
her old quarrel with regard to the boundaries, and it may be said to have existed 
in a modified form up to the present day. 

In 1633, on the 22d of November, about two hundred colonists, many of 
whom were Roman Catholics, set sail from the Isle of Wight, arriving off Point 
Comfort in Virginia early' in 1634. On the 25th of March they celebrated mass 
on the banks of the Potomac and took formal possession of the country. They 
then occupied an Indian town which the natives had ceded to them, named St. 
Mary's, and for more than half a century this town was the capital of the 
province. The capital thus established was almost at the southern extremity of 
the province, and for many years thereafter the extension of settlements into the 
interior was hindered by internal commotion and wars with the Indians. The 
proprietary government during the first century of its existence twice met with 
serious interruptions : once when it was usurped by Cromwell's Commissioners 
during the rule of the English Commonwealth, and once when it was displaced by 
the rule of William and Mary. At a time when religious toleration was unknown 
elsewhere in America, or at all in Europe, it was inaugurated under the 
proprietary government. Maryland soon became a refuge for all who suffered 
from religious persecution. Quakers and Puritans and members of the Church 
of England fled thither from New England and Virginia, and Protestants from 
France, Portugal, and the Netherlands, took refuge in Lord Baltimore's colony 
from Catholic rage. The population of the province enjoyed religious equality 
until 1692, when the royal government which had usurped the powers 
of the proprietary, made, for the first time, ecclesiastical establishment in 
Maryland. 

In 1659 Baltimore county was created. At that time the territory was almost 
a wilderness occupied by the Indians, but the colonists gradually extended the 
limits of civilization. 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY GROWTH, 



735 



In 1662 the first land within the limits of the present Baltimore city was 
patented by Thomas Gorsuch, a member of the Society of Friends. This was a 
tract of fifty acres on Whetstone Point, where to-day the gigantic grain trade of 
the West is centring. The first actual settler on the site of the city is believed 
to have been a Mr. David Jones, who gave his name to the erratic little stream 
known as Jones's Falls, which has often overflowed its banks and caused serious 
damage. 

In 1723 ships began to enter the Patapsco from London, and in 1729 an 
Act of Assembly was passed for erecting a town on the north side of the 
Patapsco, in Baltimore county. In 1730 the town was laid out into lots, and 
called Baltimore in compliment to the proprietary. It was evidently not the 
expectation of the early settlers that the town would grow to its present size, 
or they would not have established it in a location surrounded by hills, water- 
courses and marshes ; but they found abundance of stone, lime, iron and timber, 
and excellent sites for water-works near the harbor. The expense to which 
the modern Baltimoreans have been subjected for extending and grading 
streets along the numerous hills, and for covering marshes and small streams, 
is enormous. 

In 1752 Baltimore had but twenty-five houses. St. Paul's Church, which 
was begun by the members of the Church of England in 173 1 and completed 
in 1744, was a quaint building occupying the site of the present church, at 
the corner of Charles and Saratoga streets. Although the population of the 
county at that time was more than seventeen thousand, that of the town was 
but two hundred. The sloop " Baltimore " and the brig " Philip and Charles " 
were the only sea-going vessels owned in the town. The warehouse near the 
harbor, for tobacco inspection, was 



one of the principal centres of trade. 
The growth of the city was promoted 
during the war between the English 
and the French by the necessity 
which the inhabitants felt of flocking 
together for protection, rather than 
penetrating into the country. 

In 1755 the Indians came within 
eighty miles of Baltimore, and made 
numerous destructive raids. Palisades 
were constructed, and the women 
and children were placed by the 
colonists upon vessels in the harbor. 
In 1756 numerous Acadians, refugees 
from the harsh policy of the English 
in Nova Scotia, settled in Baltimore. 
The town began to grow in com- 
merce ; ship-yards were established at Fells Point, and many merchants had 
their residences there. In 1761 the population of the province was 164,007, of 




The Oldest House in Baltimore. 



736 Maryland's share in the revolution. 

which 49,675 were negroes. The good people of Maryland were greatly 
annoyed at this time by the number of convicts imported from England, 
estimated at not less than twenty thousand. These convicts were brought over 
under contract by private shippers, and sold into servitude for the entire term 
of transportation. In due time many of them were transformed into useful 
citizens, and some of them attained considerable distinction. 

In 1 76 1 the Maryland exports of tobacco, to England amounted to 140,000 
pounds. Wheat, lumber, corn, flour, iron, skins, and furs were also exported, 
and Maryland would have grown with astonishing rapidity from that date if 
England's policy of stifling manufacturing industry in the colonies, that she 
might send her own productions to them, had not been vigorously carried out. 
The iron and shipping business was greatly restricted, but, although commer- 
cially dependent upon England, the province managed to develop her natural 
resources to a considerable extent. Although Maryland acquiesced in the 
restrictions made by England upon her commerce, she heartily joined with the 
colonies in asserting the right to regulate her own internal government and 
to impose her own taxes. The freemen of the province were exceedingly 
jealous of the privileges accorded to them by the charter, and when England 
began to take the matter of taxation into her own hands by establishing the 
stamp tax, Maryland promptly expelled the stamp distributor from the province 
upon his arrival, and forbade the landing of the stamped paper which had 
been brought in the same ship with him. The attempted tax upon tea, which 
was the occasion of the sudden rebellion in Boston, was also the occasion of an 
outbreak at Annapolis, the then capital of Maryland. The colonists had refused 
from the very first to allow the tea sent from England to be unloaded, and 
in 1774 a vessel with eighteen packages of tea on board was burned at 
Annapolis. 

At the time of the declaration of independence by the Continental Congress 
in Philadelphia, the proprietary government of Maryland was held by an 
illegitimate son of Lord Baltimore, who died in 1771. The people of Maryland 
had always entertained a strong loyalty toward the Baltimores, but this 
bastard ruler was promptly objected to. His government was overthrown, 
and a convention was called to frame a Constitution for the new State of 
Maryland. 

The convention assembled at Annapolis on the 14th of August, 1776, and 
Maryland entered into the Revolutionary war with an earnestness and gallantry 
which made the name of the " Maryland line" conspicuous in Revolutionary 
annals. At the battle of Brooklyn Heights in 1776 a part of a battalion of 
Maryland troops repeatedly charged with bayonets a whole brigade of British 
regulars. They were the first American troops to use that weapon, and used it 
to such advantage that on many occasions thereafter they both charged and 
repulsed the enemy with unloaded muskets. Maryland also maintained a marine 
service during the Revolution, to protect her shores from the English cruisers. 

After the establishment of the independence of the colonies there was for 
some time an almost complete paralysis of commerce in Maryland. The low 



THE ATTACK UPON FORT MCHENRY. 737 

price of tobacco and flour, the principal articles of export from the State, added 
to the distress. But a period of marked commercial activity soon followed. 
The tobacco trade revived, English merchants who had sought to re-establish 
the agencies which they had maintained before the Revolution at Annapolis, 
Bladensburg, Upper Marlborough and Elk Ridge Landing, being superseded by 
Baltimore capitalists, who began to make shipments in their own vessels and for 
their own account. The trade of the city was greatly improved; canal companies 
along the Susquehanna and the Potomac were formed; streets were extended and 
paved; and the population, which in 1782 was nearly 8,000, became energetic 
and progressive. Sugar refineries, glass-works and flour-mills were established, 
and the Baltimore clippers carrying their products to foreign ports became 
famous everywhere. As the West began to develop, Baltimore laid hold from 
time to time upon its trade, and became the first, as it is to-day the natural, 
market for the productions of that section. 

Baltimore bore an important part in the war between England and America 
in 1 8 14, and was one of the chief sufferers by it. The British fleet blockaded the 
Chesapeake bay, and commerce was seriously affected. Many privateers were 
fitted out at Baltimore and did good service. After the burning of Washington 
by the British, a force of 5,000 English was landed at the mouth of the Patapsco 
river, a sharp battle taking place there between this force and the Maryland 
and Pennsylvania militia. On the 13th of September, 18 14, the British made a 
vigorous attack upon Fort McHenry, an important fortification which had been 
established on Whetstone Point in 1794. The little fort, with its finely planned 
batteries, completely repulsed the attacking fleet, and compelled the retreat of the 
invading forces. During the night of the bombardment, upon which the English 
admiral relied so much that he had sworn to take the fort in two hours, Francis 
S. Key, a noted Marylander and a prisoner in the British fleet, wrote the 
celebrated national song called "The Star-Spangled Banner." 

This song, which has justly been accorded the honors of the " national 
hymn," was suggested by the hopes and fears which filled the poet's heart during 
the long and terrible night, and the anxiety with which he looked at the Avails of 
the fort in the morning to see if the flag was still there : — 

" Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light 

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming ; 
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight 

O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? 
The rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air, 

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. 
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner still wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" 

While the bombs of the English ships were bursting in hundreds about the 
parapets of Fort McHenry, an adventurous rooster mounted the walls and crowed 
heartily and repeatedly. One of the defenders of the fort then declared that if 
he ever lived to see Baltimore the rooster should be fed with pound cake ; and the 
day after the bombardment, although the man was so worn down with fatigue as 



738 



THE ABUNDANT WATER COMMUNICATION. 



to be unaole to leave the fort, he sent to the city, procured the cake, and treated 
the patriotic fowl. 

Maryland has an area of about 9,500 square miles of land, and the Chesa- 
peake bay covers 4,000 more. It may be said with truth that the land 
beneath the waters is quite as productive as that above, for the oyster-beds, the 
abundance of excellent fish, the flocks of wild ducks and the multitudes of 
terrapins and crabs afford an immense commerce. The thousands of acres along 
the shores of this beautiful bay are crowded with market gardens, which supply 
Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, and New York with all the most delicate 
fruits and vegetables. 

The estuaries and navigable arms of the Chesapeake are so numerous that 
there are many counties bordering on the water, no point in which is many miles 
from a good landing. Although the actual sea- coast of Maryland is but little 
more than thirty miles, the tide-water margin, including that along the islands, is 
over 500 miles. The largest vessels can ascend the bay, pass St. Mary's, Calvert 
and Anne Arundel counties to Annapolis, and, entering the Potomac river, can 




Fort McHenry — Baltimore Harbor. [Page 737.] 

pass up by St. Mary's, Charles, and Prince George's counties to Washington. 
The Chesapeake, the Nanticoke and the Patuxent, as well as nearly fifty other 
streams, are navigable for many miles. Maryland is divided into three sections, 
two of which, separated by the Chesapeake, are very similar in formation. In 
the tide-water district, which embraces nearly one-half of the territory of the 
State, and which is supposed to have formed the bed of an ancient ocean, lie 
rich deposits of marl and shell lime. The surface is but slightly elevated above 
the sea, and the forest- growths are mainly oak, hickory, chestnut, walnut, gum, 
cedar, pine and beech. Emery, bog iron ore, kaolin, or porcelain clay, and 
gray, red and blue clays are found in profusion. In this section there is an 
excellent opportunity for the establishment of glass manufactories, as the pure 
sand is admirably adapted for that purpose. Wheat, Indian corn, tobacco, and 
cotton in the southern sections, are the grains mainly cultivated. 

On the "eastern shore," which embraces the counties of Worcester, Som- 
erset, Dorchester, Talbot, Caroline, Queen Anne's and Cecil, the soils were 
originally among the most fertile in the State. Reckless management in slave- 
holding times injured their productive value, but careful culture is gradually 



THE EASTERN SHORE ITS RESOURCES. 739 

restoring them. The sections remote from tide-water produce wheat and corn 
mainly, while in the southern portion flax and cotton are raised. In Worcester 
county there are immense cypress swamps, but the soil, in many portions, where 
it has been drained and reclaimed, is of unsurpassed fertility. Wild ducks and 
oysters abound along the Atlantic coast of this county. 

The grape grows in great perfection along the eastern shore, and in some 
counties excellent wines are manufactured. Along the western shore dwell 
many hardy fishermen, the shad and herring fisheries of the Potomac being as 
extensive as those of any other portion of the United States. As many as 
four hundred thousand barrels of herring have been taken from the Potomac, 
within a hundred miles of Washington, in a single year, and sent to the 
Baltimore market. On this, as on the eastern shore, the lands suffered for a cen- 
tury from an exhaustive system of planting, and being deserted by their owners, 
as their fertility gradually lessened, the section had a smaller white population in 
i860 than just before the Revolution; but the means of reclaiming all the lands 
exists in the great beds of shell marl which abound throughout many of the 
counties. In the southern part of the district tobacco is one of the principal 
crops, Prince George's county alone having produced as much as ten million 
pounds in a year. The clay-beds which extend through the district from the 
Potomac to the Susquehanna, and which here and there attain an elevation of 
two hundred feet above tide- water, are very valuable. The iron which the clay 
contains gives the pottery made from it a red shade, which renders it unfit for 
the choice wares ; but for the manufacture of brick, these clay-beds are the best 
in the world. Prince George's county, whence in the latter part of the seven- 
teenth century a hundred sail of ships annually carried tobacco to England and 
the West Indies, possesses the State Agricultural College, which is located near 
Bladensburg. On the southern border of Montgomery county are the great 
falls of the Potomac, one of the finest water powers in the United States. In 
this county many of the wealthy citizens of Washington have built handsome 
residences. The section suffered greatly from raids during the war, but is rapidly 
regaining its original prosperity. On the Patapsco river, in Howard county, there 
are numerous excellent granite quarries, and in Baltimore county there are fine- 
grained white and blue-gray marbles. 

The mountain district of the State, which includes Carroll, Frederick, Wash- 
ington, and Alleghany counties, is fertile and interspersed with beautiful valleys. 
It is admirably adapted to the raising of stock, and large crops of wheat and 
thousands of pounds of maple sugar are annually manufactured there. 

At Wedverton, in Frederick county, a noble water power has been made 
available by a dam across the Potomac, and here in due time an extensive 
manufacturing town will doubtless spring up. In the rugged and broken 
Alleghany county there are extensive glades or meadows whose grasses are 
famed for their luxuriance, and over which, before the late war, thousands of 
cattle from Virginia roamed while fattening for the stall. The iron ores of 
Cumberland and the coal mines have already been alluded to. The capital 
invested in mines in Alleghany county is nearly seven million dollars. 



74Q 



CONSEQUENCES OF NEGRO MIGRATION. 



Eighty-five thousand slaves were emancipated as the result of the war, and 
these persons constituted the main agricultural laboring population of the State. 
As elsewhere throughout the South, they have left the country in swarms and 
flocked to the towns, and the owners of large plantations, finding that their 
ex-slaves have deserted them, are anxious to divide up the broad tracts which 
have now become a burden to them into small vendible portions. Nowhere 
is there a better opportunity for the purchase of cheap and good lands, or for 
the practice of the highest scientific farming. 




Jones's Falls — Baltimore. 



LXXXIII. 



THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD — GROWTH OF TRADE. 




BALTIMORE, the Maryland metropolis, not only enjoys the honor of having 
received the first telegraphic message in the United States, but it was also 
the first to inaugurate a railroad. To that road, which has become one of the 
most gigantic powers in the land, it owes much of its present astonishingly rapid 
growth. The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, the 
illustrious Charles Carroll, of Carroll- 
ton, laid the corner-stone of the 
Baltimore and Ohio railroad, on the 
4th of July, 1828. Within half a 
century since the road was projected, 
Baltimore's population has increased 
from 62,000 to 350,000, and her trade 
has grown so enormously that the 
stranger who visited the town in 1 860 
would hardly recognize it now. 

When the first rails were laid 
down, there were very few who con- 
templated the completion of the road 
even to the Alleghanies, and none 
believed that it would touch the Great 
Lakes and make Chicago and Pitts- 
burg its tributaries. The material 
obstacles which beset its construc- 
tion were by no means so great as the 
financial difficulties. From 1828 until 
January in 1853, when the completion of the Wheeling and Ohio railroad 
was celebrated, the company was engaged in perpetual struggles to maintain 
its existence. As soon as the first rails were laid in the city, in 1828, a 
car which resembled a country market wagon, and which was drawn by a single 
horse, was placed upon them, and the leading citizens of Baltimore made trips 
backward and forward in it. No one had then dreamed of employing steam 
to draw the cars ; but as soon as steam was introduced in England, Mr. 
Peter Cooper, of New York, who had invented a locomotive with a boiler 
about the size of those used in hotel kitchens, forthwith solicited the privi- 
lege of trying his new and wondrous invention upon the Baltimore and 
Ohio railroad. His was the first locomotive for railroad purposes ever built 



Exchange Place, Baltimore, Maryland. 



742 



PETER COOPERS EXPERIMENT. 




The Masonic Temple — Baltimore, Maryland. 



in America, and Mr. Cooper successfully drove his own engine, to which was 
attached a car filled with the Directors and prominent citizens, a distance of 
thirteen miles on the new road in fifty-seven minutes. But as ill-luck would 

have it, on the return trip, his engine 
was beaten by a smart trotting- horse, 
whose owner, from the highway parallel 
with the road, saw the daring experi- 
menters at work, and mischievously 
resolved to test horse-flesh against 
steam. The veteran philanthropist, 
Cooper, must look back upon those 
days of primitive experiments with a 
smile when he remembers that from 
New York to St. Louis is hardly a 
journey of forty-eight hours to-day. 

From such humble beginnings the 
road rapidly grew, and, as it reached 
the Alleghanies, began to draw toward 
Baltimore a traffic in coal which has 
since been developed into colossal pro- 
portions. Millions of tons, in cars 
expressly constructed for the purpose, annually pass over the road; and the 
traveler who, seated in the hotel- station at Harper's Ferry, looks down the 
line of rail which runs along the ravine, A =~ ^ ^ ^ 

sees immense trains, drawn by ^^r ' *v.=^ 

enormous engines of a peculiar build, . - rr^gSpj^ \ 

whizzing over the tracks within ten r^>- 

minutes of each other all day long. 
In 1 83 1 the then President of the 
railroad, in a report made to the 
Governor of Maryland, boasted that 
the State had within her limits the 
longest continuous railway in the 
world. This was the road from 
Baltimore to Frederick, sixty -one 
miles in length. In the same report 
he foreshadowed the future effort to 
draw the trade of the West to 
Baltimore, when he referred to the 
fact that the State was so situated as 
to afford the surest and most conve- 
nient route of communication between 
the navigable Western waters and the 
ocean. Baltimore, with her splendid advantages of precedent, however, required 
many severe lessons before she could be made to improve her opportunities. 




The Shot- Tower — Baltimore, Maryland. 



BALTIMORE SUPPLANTING NEW YORK. 



743- 



J<th: 



One by one her rivals laid hold of the treasures of the West, while the Directors 
of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad were battling with the great canal company, 
which had so long monopolized the trade between the Chesapeake and the Ohio; 
and while the legislation of Baltimore itself so restricted the road that it could not 
obtain proper development. In 1842 the line was opened to Cumberland, now a 
fine commercial town, beautifully located in the mountains ; and on the comple- 
tion of the road to Wheeling in 1854 the commerce of Baltimore began to increase 
with tremendous rapidity. The freight to the State in 1832 had amounted to 
scarcely 30,000 tons; in 1852 it had reached 252,000 tons; in 1854 it amounted 
to 661,000 tons. All the old methods of transportation were thenceforth unavail- 
ing. The products of the West were no longer floated down the Ohio and 
Mississippi to New Orleans, there loaded into schooners, and thence carried by 
sea to the Chesapeake, and so to Baltimore. 

Just as the people of the State were beginning to despair, and to fancy that 
New York and Philadelphia had completely distanced them, their best commer- 
cial development began. Had the 
road been completed to the Ohio river 
twenty years sooner, the river system 
of the West would not to-day have 
converged toward Lake Erie. The 
wisdom of the commercial men of the 
North who had hastened to construct 
the Erie and New York Central road, 
which, with the Erie canal, seemed to 
secure to New York the great body of 
the Western trade, had been so often 
demonstrated to the Baltimoreans that 
they had quite despaired of longer 
endeavoring to make Baltimore a rival 
of New York, and were contenting 
themselves with the supply trade of the 
South. But the vigorous policy of the 
railroad men who pushed the Baltimore 
and Ohio road into the West, and courageously combated New York, has worked 
a complete revolution. Now that grain seeks quick transportation by rail, and 
that the Baltimore and Ohio road, whose connections extend through the length 
of the South and West, has reached out an arm to Chicago, Baltimore seems 
likely to be a most important tide-water terminus of the West. 

The war interrupted the many projects which President Garret, to whose 
past and present vigorous management the railroad owes much of its prosperity, 
had been maturing, and after four years of civil strife the work was begun anew. 
In 1865 the company commenced to lease Western railroads, and to elaborate its 
terminal facilities at Baltimore. As the result, it has to-day under its manage- 
ment a continuous direct road of 5 1 2 miles in length, furnishing for West Virginia 
and much of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas, the surest and cheapest 




Scene on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. 



744 



CONTEST FOR THE RIGHT OF WAY. 




path to the sea. It has thoroughly attached itself to the trade of the valley 
of the Ohio, Pittsburg, Wheeling, Marietta, Parkersburg, Portsmouth, Cincinnati, 
Louisville, and other centres, which have branches extending to them from the 
main stem. The road to Chicago completes the system, and the Baltimoreans 

claim that it relegates New York to 
the commercial inferiority which her 
inactive policy of late has been bring- 
ing upon her. Within the past few 
years, also, the metropolitan branch of 
the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, 
shortening the line between Wash- 
ington and the West nearly fifty miles, 
has been completed; and a new branch 
is in construction downward through 
the Valley of Virginia, and will doubt- 
less drain that wonderful agricultural 
region into the Baltimore basin, 
opening up, by its connection with the 
Chesapeake and Ohio railroad at 
Staunton, the coal, salt and iron 
industries of Western Virginia. The 
road has also seized on the Orange, 
The House of Refuge- Baltimore. Alexandria and Manassas line from 

Washington to Lynchburg, and given to it and its extensions the new name of 
the Washington City, Virginia Midland, and Great Southern. 

The contest with the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company for the right 
of way along the Potomac, when the Baltimore and Ohio railroad was in its 
infancy, brought into play the abilities of some of the finest leaders of the bar. 
In the trials of the Court of Appeals, where the struggle for the choice of route 
was a prolonged one, and where the decision was finally given in favor of the 
railroads, the clear-headed Taney, the commanding Webster, the majestic and 
elegant Wirt, the philanthropic Mercer, the accurate Gwynn, and the then young 
and aspiring Reverdy Johnson, made brilliant speeches. Among the men who 
planned and executed the through route were some of the most noted citizens of 
Maryland ; the names of Robert Oliver, of Alexander Brown, of William 
Lorman, of Isaac McKim,of William Patterson, Talbot Jones, George Hoffman, 
John B. Morris, William Stewart, and Philip E. Thomas, are inseparably connected 
with the projection of this great work. They were, in a measure, the pioneers of 
the railway system of this country, and to them and the thousands who have 
emulated their example in every State of the Union we owe our material 
prosperity as a nation. 

The men who determined to make Baltimore the chief of American ports 
did not overlook the necessity for proper terminal facilities. This subject engaged 
the attention of the company from the moment of its organization ; but during 
its early years, the main terminus was a small depot, which has since expanded 



LOCUST POINT. 



7-15 



into the great Mount Clare Station, where to-day there are acres of repair shops 
and locomotive houses. When the company had once resolved to provide a 
tide-water terminus, it lost no time in selecting and purchasing the grounds at 
Locust Point, a narrow strip of land at the entrance of Baltimore harbor, 
admirably adapted for the construction of wharves. The misguided stranger 
who fancies that Baltimore is a torpid town, where business enterprise is rarely 
hinted at, would do well to visit Locust Point, and correct his previous 
impressions. 

The whole peninsula, of which Locust Point is the terminus, has always 
been considered most advantageous for shipments. Early in the Revolution 
ah English corporation obtained possession of it ; but the plans of the company 
were overthrown by an act of confiscation, under which the Point was taken 
by the State and sold. In later years, the peninsula was selected as the site 
for Fort McHenry, the principal defense of the harbor. The peninsula has about 
five miles of water- frontage, along every portion of which there is a depth of 
from seventeen to twenty-one feet, easily increased to twenty-five. Locust 
Point proper comprises a water-front of about 3,600 lineal feet, and an area 
of eighty acres, seamed with railway tracks, covered with gigantic sheds and 
warehouses, and dotted with immense wharves, on which stand two mammoth 
elevators, one of which has a capacity of 600,000, and the other 1,500,000 
bushels. These elevators, through ^^___ = ___ 

which the grain, poured into Balti- ^m Hllfe_ 

more by thousands of cars from the jj^ 

great West, passes directly into the 
holds of Norwegian, Danish, and 
English vessels, are superior to any 
buildings of the kind on the Atlantic 
coast. . Their foundations rest upon 
thousands of piles, driven deep into 
the harbor-bed, and covered with oak 
cappings, upon which the massive 
granite is laid. The elevator last 
built stands upon no less than twelve 
thousand piles. Both are surrounded 
by water upon three sides, and the 
vessels flocking about them seem like 
swallows nestling on the sides of some 
huge barn. To the great steamship 
piers, which are covered with iron 
sheds and into which double track 
lines of railway run, come weekly steamships from Bremen, and thousands of 
emigrants annually pass westward through Baltimore. 

The present piers are already inadequate to the business which is poured on 
to them, and new ones will soon be erected. A huge ferry, upon which 
cars coming from the West with freight for Eastern cities are transferred to the 




The Blind Asylum — Baltimore, Maryland. 



746 



BUSINESS ACTIVITY OF LOCUST POINT. 




The Eastern High School — Baltimore, Maryland. 



.opposite side of the harbor, where connection is made with the Philadelphia, 
Wilmington and Baltimore railroad, is another of the noted sights at Locust 
Point. When trade is busiest more than two hundred and fifty cars a day are 
thus transferred, and the company intends hereafter to obviate the necessity of 

hauling passenger trains, by horse 
power, through the city, by running 
them to Locust Point across the 
harbor in barges of the ferry. A 
huge coffee warehouse has been 
erected near the elevator. 

The activity at this point is simply 
wonderful. A walk along the piers 
shows an immense panorama of stores 
of railroad iron, iron ore, bonded ware- 
houses crammed with imported 
merchandise ; great double piers along 
which hover coastwise steamers ; the 
huge bulk of a Liverpool steam-liner 
discharging its freight ; the graceful 
outlines of a. "North German Lloyd," 
with its flat-capped and clumsy-looking sailors peering over the sides ; while 
thousands of cars rattle forward and backward into and out of mysterious sheds, 
and floods of grain pour down from spouts into quaint little barks, whose 
captains tranquilly smoke their pipes as the process of loading goes on. When 
one understands that a thousand coal-cars can be daily unloaded at Locust 
Point, and that all the coal for the huge fleet of ocean steamers plying between 
New York and Europe is shipped from Baltimore, he begins to comprehend the 
reasons for the constant arrival of trains filled with their sooty freight. 

For the month ending June 30, 1874, 13,861 coal-cars, 2,072 grain-cars, and 
3,512 cars loaded with miscellaneous freight were received and emptied at Locust 
Point. The elevators are monuments to the astonishing increase of the grain 
trade of Baltimore. In 1871, the exports of bulk grain from the city were hardly 
2,000,000 bushels. As soon as the first elevator was opened, they increased 
to 4,000,000 bushels annually, and in 1873, they amounted to 7,250,000 bushels. 
The citizens of Baltimore, who once fancied that the improvements in terminal 
facilities would only enrich the company and not aid the city, have been shown 
conclusively that all kinds of property in Baltimore increases in ratio with the 
increase of export trade. The exports for the six months ending July 1, 1874, 
amounted to more than $15,250,000, or $6,000,000 more than the corresponding 
six months of 1873, and exceeding by $3,000,000 the entire exports of 1870. 
Now that the elevators are in direct connection with railway tracks penetrating 
the West, the grain receipts for the first six months of 1874 amounted to but 
600,000 bushels less than those of the entire year of 1873, and the close of 
1874 will witness the completion of elevators at Locust Point and at Canton 
whose united capacity will increase the grain trade at Baltimore to 10,000,000 



HARBOR IMPROVEMENT. 



747 



bushels for the last half of the current year. Certainly, it is not without some 
reason that the enthusiastic Baltimore merchants predict that they may claim 
$50,000,000 in exports annually in a few years. 

The improvement of the harbor of Baltimore was for many years talked of 
as desirable, but did not become an imperative necessity until the action of the 
railroad company had made the town one of the most important of Ameri- 
can ports. It was evident that if Baltimore was to have a large European trade, 
her ship-channel, leading from the Patapsco river into the Chesapeake, must 
be deepened. Large appropriations were made by Congress and the city of 
Baltimore, in equal portions. The new channels will permit the approach to the 
city at low water of vessels drawing from twenty-two and a-half to twenty-three 
feet ; and at high water, of those drawing twenty-four to twenty-five feet. The 
only improvements now necessary are such as will allow vessels of the largest 
draft to load directly at the wharves, and this work, which is being rapidly, 
effected by the River and Harbor Commission, comprehends the deepening 
of the channel to the wharves from Fort McHenry. 




% "^pgt- 


rt* 








'$$$&&•£ 






SSgKr ~ 






SHI? 1 - 


"■1" .'i. ; : 


P. 



View of a Lake in Druid Hill Park, Baltimore. 



48 



LXXXIV. 



THE TRADE OF 



1ALTIMORE ITS RAPID AND ASTONISHING 

GROWTH. 



THE view of Baltimore harbor, as one enters it from the Chesapeake on one 
of the noble steamers of the Norfolk and Baltimore line, is highly 
picturesque. At the narrow mouth of the long and irregularly-shaped basin, 
which is thronged on either side with groups of imposing buildings, stands Fort 
McHenry. 

On the eastward shore, and nearly opposite Locust Point, is Canton, which 
was laid out by a company organized in 1828, and has sprung into a wonderfully 
active life during the past few years. In addition to its wharf property, the 
Canton Company to-day owns twenty-eight hundred acres of land, and a water- 
front of twenty thousand feet. Many of the most important manufacturing 

interests of Baltimore are located in 



this active suburb. Oyster and fruit 
packing- ho uses, sugar refineries, 
brick-yards, foundries, steam saw- 
mills, iron and copper smelting fur- 
naces, coal oil refineries, breweries 
and distilleries, ship-yards and bat- 
ting factories are densely crowded 
together along the streets arising from 
the water, and five to six thousand 
operatives are employed in the 
various works. 

The Canton Company has shown 
itself capable of the largest enterprise 
in increasing the terminal facilities of 
Baltimore, and is constantly adding 
to its wharfage forests of piles, their 
scraggy heads, which appear above the 
dark water, testifying to the rapidity 
with which new wharves can be built 
as soon as they are needed. The 
railroads centring at Canton drain a vast extent of rich country, and the elevators 
to be erected there will make it, in time, as important a terminus as its busy 
neighbor, Locust Point. The Union railroad, projected mainly under the 
auspices of the Canton Company, was a gigantic undertaking, adding immensely 





Maryland Institute — Baltimore. 



THE UNION RAILROAD CANTON'S GRAIN TRADE. 



749 



to the commercial advantages of Baltimore, — its double tracks connecting 
the Baltimore and Potomac, the Western Maryland, the Northern Central, and 
the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore railroads. Much of it was con- 
structed at great outlay through tunnels under the city and over treacherous 
soil ; but the two million dollars which 

it cost are a mere bagatelle when j^JMlfi Hfcfe. 

compared with the increase of trade 
which it will give the city, as it 
affords another long-needed outlet to 
tide- water. It 'is, indeed, precisely 
the kind of road so much needed 
to-day in Boston and New York, 
and which neither of those great 
cities has yet shown sufficient sagac- 
ity to provide. All the' railroads 
passing through Baltimore are entitled 
to its use at a fixed rate per mile. 

When the Canton elevators are 
completed, Baltimore harbor will be 
richer in facilities for immediate and 
convenient shipment to Europe of 
Western produce than any other city 
on the continent. The grain trade 
now centring at Canton is enormous, 
but the elevators there are totally 
insufficient to meet the demand. 
The sugar refinery at Canton has large piers, and the chemical and oil works, 
and the distilleries, ^ together covering many acres, require extensive wharf 
accommodation. Large coal oil manufactories are shortly to be established along 
the water-front at Baltimore, and will add much to the business of the new 
Union railroad. 

The completion of the Baltimore and Potomac railroad, in 1873, forming a new 
connection between Baltimore and Washington, opened up five of the most fertile 
lower counties on the western shore of the State — counties which heretofore 
have had no ready means of communication with the metropolis except by water. 
The railroad included the construction of large tunnels both at Baltimore and 
Washington, and forms a very important link in the great Southern line of the 
Pennsylvania Central railroad. It has had a marked influence upon the character 
of the population of the western shore. 

The residents of that section before the war were large slave-holders, and 
contented themselves with an unambitious life, devoted mainly to the raising of 
large crops of tobacco and cereals, and with the ordinary enjoyments of the 
country gentlemen of Maryland. Among them, however, there were many who, 
before the slavery regime had passed away, saw the necessity of a means of 
speedy transit to and from the sea-board, and at the close of the war they were 




Woodberry, near Druid Hill Park. 



75o. 



RAILWAYS TRIBUTARY TO BALTIMORE. 




S-^ 






prominent in aiding in the building and equipment of the road.- This great work, 
which is one of the most solidly constructed in the United States, cost nearly 
six and a-half millions of dollars, one hundred thousand cubic yards of rock 

having been blasted through during 
the construction of the tunnel in 
Baltimore. It has already given an 
important impetus to forming a trade 
along its whole line. The Western 
Maryland railroad, which extends 
from Williamsport oil the Potomac 
river to tide-water at Baltimore, was 
completed in December of 1873. It 
is a work which called for the best 
engineering talent, built as it is across 
the very summit of the Blue Ridge. 
From this summit a fine view is 
obtained of the vast valley of the 
Cumberland, which, backed with its 
rugged mountain slopes, and filled with 
nourishing farms and villages, presents 

The New City Hall- Baltimore, Maryland. & constant panorama of charming 

scenery. The road's main service to Baltimore will consist in the current of 
coal which it can pour from Williamsport on to the wharves at Canton. 

The Northern Central railway, 
formerly known as the Baltimore and 

Susquehanna, was one of the first f §^pia |. 

routes to import locomotives from I 

Liverpool in the early history of rail- ll 

road travel ; and by its connection ' Jrfl iSB^fc 

to-day with the great Pennsylvania 
road, and, through that route, with 
the Lakes, the West, the North- 
west, and the South, is a valuable 
feeder to Baltimore commerce. The 
Northern Central Railroad Company 
has invested very largely in lands at 
Canton, and proposes the erection of 
spacious piers, wharves, and elevators, 
for the reception of the grain from 
the West. It runs through a line of 
busy suburban villages, filled, like the 
manufacturing towns in the most 
prosperous sections of New Eng- 
land, with small manufacturing establishments ; passes Timonium, where the 
old Maryland families were wont to attend the annual State races ; passes. 




Lafayette Square, Baltimore, Maryland. 



BALTIMORE COAL AND GRAIN TRADE. 751 

Cockeysville, near which marble, granite, and lime quarries, and important 
iron works are located; and crosses the Gunpowder river, a small tributary of the 
Chesapeake, which winds picturesquely among overhanging rocks. Over this 
route to Harrisburg, and thence by Altoona across the Alleghanies, goes a great 
share of the through travel from South and East to West. 

The coal trade of Baltimore has been very largely increased by the rapid 
railroad development of the past two years. The Maryland coal regions, which 
stretch away through the George's Creek valley from Piedmont to Frostburg, 
furnish millions of tons yearly. In this Cumberland region, situatey "bout two 
hundred miles from Baltimore, the stores of coal are almost inexhausdble. The 
city can certainly count upon supplies from them for many centuries. It is but a 
few years since seventeen hundred tons were considered a heavy shipment yearly 
from the Cumberland mines, but in 1872 1,915,000 tons were shipped thence to 
Baltimore, while in the same year the city received 600,000 tons of gas and 
anthracite coal from Western Virginia and Pennsylvania. Baltimore can to-day 
supply coal freights for five thousand vessels. Her coastwise trade in coal is 
enormous, and within the past two years her foreign trade has sprung into 
proportions which bid fair to rival those of any port in the world. The demand 
in the Baltimore market has at all times latterly been difficult to meet, and vast 
as are the resources of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad and the - Chesapeake and 
Ohio canal, they are quite insufficient. It is proposed to extend the Western 
Maryland line until it taps the Pennsylvania railroad, thus giving a shorter 
route than any present one to Pittsburg, by means of which the trade will be 
still further increased. 

In 1873 the Baltimore and Ohio railroad brought 2,752,178 tons of coal to 
Baltimore. 

The comparative receipts of grain for four years are as follows : 

1873. 1872. 1871. 1870. 

Wheat, 2,810,917 2,456,100 4,076,017 3,°39,357 

Corn, 8,330,449 9>°45,465 5,735,921 3,831,676 

Oats, 1,255,072 1,959,161 1,833,409 1,243,720 

Rye, 100,519 .' 9°,93 8 •••• ■ 88,956 77,772 

Peas, 10,000 10,000 ...... 10,000 10,000 

Beans, 30,000 30,000 ...... 30,000 30,000 



Total, 12,536,967 13,571,664 11,774,303 8,232,531 

The coffee and flour trades of Baltimore are very extensive. In the impor- 
tation of coffee Baltimore stands second among the ports of the United States, 
the receipts there being more than twice the aggregate entries at the chief 
ports of Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans. It has indeed become a port 
of entry for New York coffee merchants because of the facilities offered for 
economical handling. The imports for 1873 amounted to 384,808 bags. The 
receipts of flour for the same year from the West footed up 1,054,033 barrels, 
and the product of the city mills during that time was 258,579 barrels. The 
trade in flour has steadily increased for the past seven years, and the exports 



752 SUGAR, TOBACCO, AND IRON INTERESTS. 

of that article from the city for 1873 amounted to 359,566 barrels, many of 

which went to Brazil and the West Indies. 

The sugar trade of Baltimore is also very extensive, and the Baltimore, 

Maryland, Calvert and Chesapeake refineries work up more than 100,000,000 

pounds of the crude material annually. In 1871 these refineries produced 

91,000,000 pounds of refined sugar, and the total supply for 1873 was 

96,387 tons. In 1873 the sugar refineries of Baltimore took 75,000 tons of sugar 

and 30,000 hogsheads of molasses. The six refineries which work up pure 

sugar and molasses produced in that same year 75,000 tons of refined sugars 

and syrups. Baltimore ranks now only second to New York as a sugar market. 

The tobacco trade has long been of great importance to the city. In colonial 

days it was the chief dependence of its commerce, and the old inspection laws, 

which were very judicious, still remain 

in force. The city has now six large 

tobacco warehouses. During 1873, 

65,067 hogsheads were inspected, and 

T'.^f I more than 50,000 were exported to 

"'^"' : i £ ... „ i Bremen, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Eng- 

f2; •■ ■ i '"'" ""'I ! L '"-~*;T- land, France, Spain, Trieste, Italy and 

?"f|li' _-_ ' ^iliiil !-i ----- •■=£?« '''fll 1 

, ..„...-:..... ...,._.....--yr^. , ,1 ) '■■ a, |» j» ^ ffi ■^.-..'•'iill Antwerp. Most of the tobacco sold 

,'p iff; ,r i fi |f r , ,. .. - rf ] |f " .- ■,, ".,-. :■; 

':■•■: ' - : ' ■' ' -■ - r^ at Baltimore comes from the interior 

;i|fc|l :.■"■";;. ||1 of Maryland, from Ohio, and from 

; : J^ fji-j' ^-Iff HI Kentucky, and is principally used in 

Germany and France. Baltimore has 
many large factories for the manufac- 
ture of tobacco, and millions of cigars 
EllpIH '" ^""^ are made there every year. 

-:^''V; ''^^^il^i-x; In lumber, iron, cotton, and petro- 

~-^'-"* : f .^"- leum the trade of this active commercial 

The City Jail — Baltimore, Maryland. , . ,, . . „. 

centre is also rapidly increasing. I he 
export of lumber to Germany now forms a very lucrative branch of trade. The 
receipts of oil from Western Virginia and Pennsylvania wells in 1873 were 
399,360 barrels, and there are numerous oil refineries which prepare the crude 
petroleum for export. The total exports of oil in 1873 were 3,470,995 gallons; 
and 66,415 bags of oil-cake were also sent abroad. 

Not so much progress has been made latterly in the iron trade as in other 
branches. Ixi 1872 there were in the State twenty blast furnaces, producing 
upward of 54,000 tons, but the production in 1873 did not probably reach 
50,000 tons. The importations of English and Scotch iron to Baltimore are 
yearly decreasing. There are a number of bar and plate iron works in the 
city which do a very heavy business. One company alone controls four plate- 
mills which yield an annual product of a million dollars in value. The rolling- 
mills of the great railroad corporations are vast. A journey through the shops 
of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad at Mount Clare is the work of a day. Two 
regiments of laborers are employed. It is not generally known that Maryland, 




MISCELLANEOUS TRADE OF BALTIMORE. 



75. 




particularly in the vicinity of Baltimore, produces some of the best charcoal 
pig-iron in the country, and in such quantities that this city may be considered 
the principal market for that staple. Orders are constantly received, even from 
St. Louis, for "charcoal pig." There 
are eleven charcoal furnaces in the 
State, which produced during 1873 
nearly 25,000 tons. The oldest now 
in operation is the Catoctin furnace, 
quite recently built. Pig-iron was 
exported from Maryland to England 
as early as 171 7, but in 1737 the 
colonists were graciously permitted 
to make bar iron, — the act, however, 
providing that they should build no 
rolling-mills which should interfere 
with the manufactories of Great 
Britain. Along the lines of the 
Philadelphia, Wilmington and Balti- 
more railroad, and the Washington 
branch of the Baltimore and Ohio, 
for a distance of fifty miles, there is 
a bed of ore six to eight miles wide, 
and in many places fifty feet deep. 
This is a carbonate of iron peculiar to Maryland, imbedded in clay, and 
yielding from 32 to 40 per cent, at the furnaces. In Maryland it is known 
as chocolate ore. 

The copper smelting works at Canton are the largest on the Atlantic coast, 
producing from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 pounds of refined copper per annum. 

The annual cotton receipts usually amount to from 100,000 to 120,000 bales, 
fully one-third of which is exported to Liverpool and German ports. 

Millions of swine, slaughtered at the various packing points throughout the 
West, and thousands of beef cattle, are annually received in Baltimore markets, 
whence they are dispersed through the South and the East. 

More than a thousand vessels arrive at Baltimore yearly. The total value of 
the imports in 1873 was $32,116,721 ; the exports, $23,387,812. The receipts 
of customs at Baltimore for the same period, notwithstanding the free entry of 
coffee and the reduction of duties on many other articles, amounted to nearly 
$7,000,000. The manufacture of boots and shoes in Baltimore gives employ- 
ment to four thousand persons, and the total value of the trade in 1873 was 
more than $23,000,000. The jobbing and provision trade makes steady and 
rapid progress. More than two hundred houses are engaged in the liquor trade 
in Baltimore. The capital invested in whiskey is $3,000,000; the receipts from 
sales average $6,000,000. 

The gentle oyster furnishes the means of livelihood to more than twenty 
thousand men, women, and children, in this liveliest of Southern cities. The 



The Peabody Institute — Baltimore, Maryland 



754 



THE MARYLAND OYSTER TRADE. 



resources of the Chesapeake bay and its tributaries are so vast that no 
competition with Baltimore in this trade is possible. More than thirty years 
ago, an enterprising individual established a house on Federal Hill for the 
canning of cooked oysters. He had discovered the secret of hermetically sealing 
the cans, and fancied that he was to become a millionaire, but a hundred 
ambitious rivals sprang up, and whole streets in Baltimore are to-day lined 
with the oyster packeries. Eight hundred small schooners and three thousand 
little boats are engaged from the middle of September until early in the spring 
in lifting the oysters from their tranquil beds with dredges, tongs and rakes, 
and in bringing them to the packing establishments, where they are ruthlessly 
torn from their shells, packed, raw or cooked, in cans from which air is carefully 
excluded, and shipped for inland consumption as a much-coveted luxury. In 

one single house fifty thousand cans of raw oysters 
are daily packed, while another establishment prepares 
thirty thousand cans of cooked bivalves in the same 
time. The manufacture of cans in which oysters and 
prepared fruits are transported is not a small item 
in the trade of Baltimore, nearly thirty million cans 
being annually manufactured for that market. Half- 
a-dozen large printing houses are occupied in prepar- 
ing labels for the cans, and long lines of lime-kilns, 
with a capacity of one thousand to twelve hundred 
bushels each, dispose of the millions of oyster shells 
which otherwise would block the streets. One firm 
alone makes more than 600,000 bushels of pure 
white lime in a year. Farmers are paid to carry 
away the shells used in the construction of roads, 
or in the improvement of lands near the. city. 

When spring comes, and the great army of 
employes who have been occupied with the oyster 
during the winter would otherwise be idle, the fleet 
of schooners and boats penetrates all the streams 
flowing into the Chesapeake, and their crews pur- 
chase from the orchards and market gardens along 
those streams thousands of tons of fruit and vege- 
tables. The oyster packeries are transformed into 
manufactories of savory conserves. Peaches, pears, apples, berries, tomatoes — 
pickles of every imaginable kind — are so prepared that they can be exported to 
any part of the world. Large kegs are annually sent to Hindostan, to China, 
to Japan, and throughout middle and western Europe. The oyster-beds of 
Maryland extend, from a point in Kent county opposite Baltimore, southward 
down to and up the Potomac forty miles, a total of one hundred and twenty- 
five miles, and east and west across the Chesapeake bay and Tangier sound, 
and up all their tributaries as far as salt water reaches. Maryland maintains ' 
a State oyster police force, employs a cruiser to protect her interests, has an 




First Presbyterian Church — Baltimore. 



BALTIMORE CLIPPERS FEDERAL HILL. 755 

elaborate oyster law, and in the shape of licenses, fines, &c, draws an annual 
revenue from the trade of between $50,000 and $60,000. 

From this slight review of the commercial interests of Baltimor.e, it is easy 
to see that this city has become the most formidable commercial rival of 
New York on the Atlantic sea-board. It has the shortest inland lines to the 
Western granaries ; its terminal facilities are superb ; its rates for transportation 
are reasonable ; imports pass with readiness and dispatch through the Custom- 
House, and importers are free from the many vexatious delays that. have made 
New York a disagreeable port of entry. It requires seventy-two hours longer 
for a steamer of 3,000 tons to bring her cargo to Baltimore, but this extra 
charge is offset by the $2,000 which its owner may save by buying its coal in 
Baltimore instead of New York, while the difference between the terminal and 
berth charges of Baltimore and New York is great. 

The recovery of the prestige of Baltimore has greatly encouraged her 
leading merchants and business men, and has done away to some extent with 
that provincial spirit so long characteristic of the place. In 1798, when 
Baltimore was a struggling village, it ranked as the third commercial port in 
the United States, had more than 30,000 tons of registered shipping, and 
exports amounting to about $12,000,000 annually. Twenty years later, the 
fleetest vessels that floated on the high seas under any flag were the Baltimore 
clippers, those renowned specimens of marine architecture whose praises were 
sung in every clime, and of whose captains there are yet few equals and no 
superiors. These clippers were schooner-rigged, and so built as to sail within 
four or four and a-half points of the wind. This enabled them to elude the 
pursuit of any vessels belonging to blockading squadrons in the stormy days 
between 1790 and 1807, and they did the chief part of the American and West 
Indian trade for this country, besides a large carrying trade for European 
nations. But as the clippers vanished from the seas, and Baltimore seemed over- 
whelmed by that disastrous lack of energy which was the natural consequence of 
the system of slavery, her commerce slipped away, and it was only by the 
projection and completion of that mighty work, the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, 
which spanned the Alleghanies and laid hold upon the fertile fields of the West, 
that she succeeded in regaining her proud position. For the first five months of 
1874, the aggregate shipments of wheat and corn have been 5,277,000 bushels. 
The Liverpool Steamship Line has been sending extra steamers for the shipment 
of grain, and everything indicates a massive and tremendous increase of trade 
in the old city from month to month and from year to year for many decades 
to come. 

From Federal Hill, the lofty bank south-west of the inner basin of Baltimore 
harbor, a fine view may be had of the city and the blue waters of the bay. 
Federal Hill is an historic eminence. It was christened by the Federalists of 
1787, who on the adoption of the Constitution of the United States testified 
their joy by having a grand procession, and rigging and equipping a model ship 
called the "Federalist," which, after being paraded through the streets of the 
town, was burned on the hill. Four thousand persons there sat down to a grand 



75^ VIEW FROM FEDERAL HILL. 

dinner at which speeches were made in favor of the new Constitution. The little 
ship of State was afterward launched and navigated down Chesapeake bay- 
to the mouth of the Potomac and thence to Mount Vernon, where it was 
presented to General Washington. It was on Federal Hill also that a disturbance 
occurred in the early days of Secession, when an attempt was made to display the 
flag of the South, and to fire one hundred guns in honor of South Carolina. 
There, too, General Butler posted his troops when he took possession of the 
city; and there are seen to-day the earthworks thrown up by the soldiers from 
Massachusetts and New York. Opposite Federal Hill, beyond the basin, the steep 
streets rise to lofty heights, along which are built the fashionable residences, 
many of the public buildings, the monuments, the churches, the theatres and the 
banks. At the foot of the hill, and grouped about the unsavory basin, which 
emits odors similar to those of the Amsterdam and Rotterdam canals, are long 
and by no means cleanly streets, lined with petty shops and crowded with piles 
of wood and lumber, with bustling stevedores and roustabouts, negro wood- 
sawyers and wholesale shipping merchants. 

Looking out over this solid commercial town, and meditating on its trade's 
enormous growth, one is almost inclined to forget that it has any love for art. 
Yet it has two of the finest private picture galleries in the country. The 
collections of Mr. William T. Walters and Colonel J. Strieker Jenkins are world- 
famous. Mr. Walters' gallery is enriched with the paintings of Delaroche, 
Meissonier, Gerome, Edouard Frere, Corot, Plassan, Troyon, Achenbach, and 
dozens of other celebrated artists. The best efforts of the French pencil, and 
some of the finest works of American artists, grace the halls of Colonel Jenkins. 
Rinehart, the sculptor, who died recently in Italy, has left to Baltimore much 
good statuary. 

The "Maryland," "Allston," and "Baltimore" Clubs are remembered with 
pleasure by all visitors to the metropolis. Their graceful hospitality and the 
memories of the luxurious terrapin which they recall can never fade away. The 
theatrical edifices are very good, and when the new " Academy of Music " is 
completed, the town will have a charming opera house. 



LXXXV. 

BALTIMORE AND ITS INSTITUTIONS. 

BALTIMORE well deserves the name of the " Monumental City," many years 
ago bestowed upon it. The stately column which rises from a hill in the 
fashionable quarter of the city, and known as the Washington Monument, is 180 
feet high. It is surmounted by a colossal statue of the Father of his Country, 
and on the great pedestal, from each side of which radiate pretty parks and 
fine avenues, are the following inscriptions : 

To 

George W a shikgton, 

by the 

State of Maryland. 



Born February 22, 1732. 



Commander-in-Chief of the American Army, June 15, 1775. 

Trenton, December 25, 1776. 

Yorktown, October 19, 1781. 

Commission Resigned at Annapolis, December 23, 1783. 



President of the United States, March 4, 1782, 

Retired to Mount Vernon, March 4, 1797. 

Died December 14, 1799. 

The square in which the monument stands is called Mount Vernon, after the 
home of General Washington. On the south side of the square is the Peabody 
Institute, founded by the famous banker, George Peabody, who never forgot, in 
his liberal series of donations, his adopted home and the scene of his early 
business success. On the 12th of February, 1857, Mr. Peabody donated $300,000 
to the city for the establishment of an Institute, and appointed a number of 
prominent citizens as trustees of the fund. It is devoted to the selection of a 
fine library and the creation of an academy of music, and is intended to foster 
the elevation of the middle class. Every citizen of Baltimore can avail himself 
of the advantages of the Institute, which has already done much for the encour- 
agement of public taste and knowledge in special branches of art. 

A little to the west of the Peabody Institute stands Grace Church, and north 
of it the First Presbyterian Church, one of the most beautiful religious edifices 
in the country. A little south of the monument is the old cathedral. This 



758 



THE MONUMENTS OF BALTIMORE. 



noble building, which was begun in 1806, is in the form of a Roman cross, and 
is a massive and imposing structure. It was finally completed only in 1865. 
The interior is decorated with many paintings, some of which are of rare merit. 
The Battle Monument, which stands in Monument Square, was erected in 

=s __ , -_^__ ■■^- ft —~ ^ memory of the citizens who fell in 

defense of Baltimore at the battle of 
North Point, at the bombardment of 
Fort McHenry in 18 14. The shaft of 
the monument is a fasces, symbolical 
of the Union, and the rods are bound 
together by a fillet on which are 
inscribed the names of those who were 
killed. On the north and south fronts 
of the base of the fasces are two excel- 
lent bas-reliefs, one representing the 
death of General Ross at the battle 
of North Point, and the other the 
bombardment of the fort. The column 
is surmounted by a statue of Balti- 
more, and at the feet of the statue 
stands an eagle. The monument is 
enclosed with an iron railing, outside 
of which are chains fastened to marble 
cannon. Around Monument Square 
are grouped the City Hall, formerly 
the residence of Reverdy Johnson ; Barnum's Hotel, which Charles Dickens 
praised as one of the best hotels in the country ; and the famous Guy's 
Restaurant, where the terrapin and soft-shelled crab are served in all the glory 
and perfection of Baltimore cookery. 

Wildey Monument, on Broadway, above Baltimore street, is an imposing 
column designed to perpetuate the memory of Past Grand Sire Thomas Wildey, 
the founder of the Odd -Fellows in America. In the Green Mount cemetery 
stands the McDonough statue, erected to the memory of a philanthropic 
merchant, who was a son of Baltimore, and a prominent citizen of New Orleans ; 
and in Ashland Square a plain but massive column commemorates the two 
youths who slew General Ross, the Commander of the British forces, in the 
battle in 18 12. 

Prominent among the public buildings of Baltimore is the new City Hall, 
which is an imposing structure of composite architecture, in which the Renais- 
sance predominates. It fills the entk-e square enclosed by Holliday, Lexington, 
North, and Fayette streets. The dome, which adds but little in beauty to the 
building, is 222 feet above the level of the ground. The City Hall is situated 
in the business portion of the town ; and, if it were not walled in by numerous 
inferior buildings, would be a fine ornament. The Exchange, in Gay street, is. 
a noticeable building, with fine Ionic columns on its east and west sides, and is 




Mount Vernon Square, with a view of the Washington 
Monument, Baltimore, Maryland. 



THE MARYLAND INSTITUTE HOSPITALS. 



759 



ml 



also surmounted by a huge dome, something like an inverted butter-bowl. The 
Custom- House and Post- Office are in this building, the former fronting on 
Lombard street, a busy and substantial avenue. On Baltimore street, the main 
commercial avenue* of the town, is the Maryland Institute for promoting the 
mechanic arts. It is a handsome and commodious structure, the ground floor 
of which is occupied by the Centre market. The main hall of this building is 
one of the largest in the country, and during the annual Mechanics' Fair 
thousands of visitors from all parts of the State flock into it. It was in this hall 
that Breckenridge was nominated by the Southern politicians in i860, and that 
the great Union Sanitary Fair in 
1863, and the Southern Relief Fair 
in 1866, were held. The schools 
of design connected with the Insti- 
tute are in admirable condition, and 
the library is large and constantly 
increasing in size. The Court- 
House, at the corner of Monument 
Square and Lexington street, is a 
highly ornamented marble and brick 
building, surrounded by streets filled 
with the offices of the legal fraternity. 
The new United States Court- House, 
at the corner of North and Fayette 
streets, is a massive building. On 
Madison street stand the City Prison 
and the State Penitentiary. 

Baltimore is very rich in charita- 
ble institutions. The Maryland 
Hospital for the Insane, a fine build- 
ing on East Monument street in the 
eastern part of the city; the Mount 
Hope Hospital, conducted by the 
Sisters of Charity; the Baltimore 
Infirmary, controlled by the regents 
of the University ; the Washington 
Medical College, the Washington Infirmary, many " Homes" for aged people,, 
the Maryland Institution for the Instruction of the Blind ; the Church Home,, 
conducted by the Protestant Episcopal Church of the city ; the orphan asylums 
of St. Anthony and St. Vincent de Paul '(Bay View Asylum, or the Work- 
house, which stands on the Philadelphia road, a short distance from the eastern 
limits of the city, can accommodate twelve hundred persons, and cost a million 
of dollars), the Maryland State Insane Asylum, on the Frederick road, six 
miles from the city, and the Sheppard Asylum for the Insane, are all testimonials, 
to the liberality and beneficence of the wealthy. The will of Mr. McDonough, 
by which very large sums were left to Baltimore and New Orleans to be 




'■I 1 '! 



ffife 



If; : : ; 

r 



M 




The Battle Monument, seen from Barnum's Hotel — Baltimore. 



760 



DONATION BY MOSES SHEPPARD. 



Jl 




m 





devoted to the education of poor children, gave the former $800,000, which 
the trustees have expended in purchasing a large farm ten miles from the city, 

and where they propose to erect a fine 

institution in which hundreds of pupils 

will receive constant instruction in 

A English studies, music, and agriculture. 

Beggars are rarities in Baltimore. 
The "Association for the Improvement 
of the Condition of the Ppor " has the 
most prominent of the citizens enrolled 
upon its books, and all who are worthy 
objects of charity receive prompt assist- 
ance. A host of minor charitable 
institutions, under the charge of the 
Catholic and Protestant Churches, aid 
the above-mentioned useful society ; 
and, as the system of tenement houses 
is almost entirely unknown in the city, 
but little of the misery and wretched- 
ness so peculiar to large towns is 
noticeable. The munificent donation 
of $600,000, left Baltimore some years 
ago by Moses Sheppard for the estab- 
lishment of a hospital for the insane, 
has, by judicious investments, increased to nearly a million dollars, and a beautiful 
Elizabethan structure, which is to be surrounded by one of the most exquisite 
landscape gardens in the United 



States, is now arising a few miles 
from Baltimore. The establishment is 
mainly designed as a curative hos- 
pital, while Mount Hope, in the 
north-western centre of the city, is 
devoted to the treatment of the 
incurably insane. The Deaf and 
Dumb Asylum, which has been 
established by the State in Frederick 
City, has also received liberal dona- 
tions from the people of Baltimore. 
The venerable Thomas Kelso, for 
eighty-two years a citizen of the 
Monumental City, some time since 
endowed a Methodist Episcopal 
Orphan Asylum with $100,000, and 
a wealthy lumber dealer has left 
nearly half a million for the establish- 



'3*ww 



The Battle Monument— Baltimore, Maryland. [Page 758.] 




The Cathedral — Baltimore, Mar}' land. 



JOHNS HOPKINS AND HIS GIFTS. 



761 









The Wildey Monument — Baltimore, Maryland. 



ment of an asylum for female orphans. The House of Refuge for vagrant 

and vicious children, opened in 1855, * s a noble range of buildings situated 

a short distance beyond the western ^g^^^fe, 

limits of the city, and within its walls 

nearly 2,000 boys and girls have 

been taught trades and received a 

plain but comprehensive educa- 
tion since the inauguration of 

the city. The Baltimore Orphan 

Asylum, founded in 1801, the Chil- 
dren's Aid Society, the Baltimore 

Manual Labor School, the Male 

Free School for Baltimore, and the 

Maryland Industrial School for Girls, 

have all been amply and generously 

supported since their foundation. 

Mr. Johns Hopkins, one of the 

merchant princes of Baltimore, and 

identified with its history for more 

than half a century, left the bulk of 

his immense fortune to the city. The 

whole of his donations amount to 

nearly seven millions of dollars, two millions of which he devoted to the 

establishment of one of the finest hospitals in the world, for the treatment of sur- 

^ _ . . _ ja „_ _ __,_ gical cases and general disease. The 

^ _ . r - site of the old Maryland Hospital was 

purchased by Mr. Hopkins, and the new 
edifice will arise thereon. Under the 
supervision of the trustees of this hos- 
pital is also an asylum for the education 
and maintenance of several hundreds of 
colored orphan children. The remain- 
der of the donation is devoted to the 
establishment of a university at Clifton, 
the beautiful country residence of Mr. 
Hopkins. This university will have 
law, medical, classical, and agricultural 
schools, and its endowment of 
$4,000,000 with 400 acres of land 
should make it one of the most famous 
sites of learning in the country. Mr. 
Hopkins died in December, 1873. He 
was connected with almost all the great 

enterprises that have entered into the history of Baltimore; and from 1847 

until the day of his death was a Director in the Baltimore and Ohio Railway 




Entrance to Druid Hill Park — Baltimore, Maryland. 



762 



THE CHURCHES OF BALTIMORE. 



Company. When the Company was fighting through the embarrassments 
which constantly crippled it until 1857, ne often voluntarily endorsed its notes. 
By the liberal manner in which he sustained the credit of the corporation the 
completion and success of the great road were insured. Mr. Hopkins' interest 
in the Company was only exceeded in value by that held by the State of 
Maryland and the city of Baltimore. He owned at one time shares of the 
stock whose actual market worth was $3,000,000. He was almost the controller 
of the various banks of Baltimore, and a large stockholder in them all, as well as 
in many of the Virginia banks. In 1873, when the news of the great panic in 
New York swept down through the business quarter of Baltimore, and the alarm 
which had been so disastrous in other cities was about to strike terror in the 
Maryland metropolis, Mr. Hopkins announced his determination to avert the 
calamity from his native town. He held at that time $2,000,000 worth of 
commercial paper, and had some investments which were affected by the sudden 






Si'frU«".|'*> ' "'--SI "~- ■.•^■--"-V. .•^■- v. .:.. . :-«..._ >-.-, 
. ,/;;v%? ■"- % 

Scene on the Canal, near Harper's Ferry. 

crisis; but he put his shoulder to the wheel, loaned his money until it was 
exhausted, then loaned his name, which was as good as money, charging nothing 
for it in many cases, and, thanks to his generous efforts, Baltimore was uninjured 
by the financial crisis. 

Prominent among the more beautiful churches of Baltimore is the superb 
Gothic structure near the Washington Monument, known as the Mount Vernon 
Place Methodist Episcopal Church, completed in 1872. The First Presbyterian 
Church, on Madison and Park streets, built of New Brunswick freestone in the 
pointed Gothic style ; the Independent Methodist Church, and the Eutaw Place 
Baptist and St. Paul's Churches, are all imposing religious edifices. The Masonic 
Temple on Charles street, and the noble building which the Young Men's 
Christian Association of Baltimore is now erecting at the corner of Charles and 
Saratoga streets, the former of white marble, are substantial buildings of the 
modern type. It is astonishing that Baltimore is not built entirely of this 



DRUID HILL PARK. 



763 




The Bridge at Harper's Ferry. 



marble, as there are inexhaustible supplies of the rich material within easy 
access of the city. 

The parks and suburbs of the " Liverpool of America" are on the same 
magnificent scale as the charitable institutions and terminal facilities. Druid 
Hill park was purchased in i860 for half a million dollars. It is within half a 
mile of the present city limits, and the Park Commissioners found the five 
hundred acres which comprise it 
already laid out; for the Rogers fam- 
ily, whose estate it once was, fashioned 
the superb grounds a century ago into 
the style of the English parks of the 
period. Situated on the highest point 
of land near the city, there are many 
noble views of the great town and the 
blue bay beyond ; downward, toward 
Kent Island and Annapolis, and east- 
ward and westward, fertile valleys 
and sweet landscapes salute the eye. 
The Rogers family owned the present 
park for one hundred and fifty years, and carefully shielded many noble sylvan 
monarchs from the profanation of the woodman's axe. Great bouquets and 
masses of superb trees dot the lawns; antique woodlands skirt the roadways; and 
in autumn the rich orange and crimson of the sassafras and dogwood leaves 
contrast charmingly with the deep browns and purples of the oaks and the gold 
of the hickory.* 

From the terrace in front of the mansion in the centre of Druid Hill park, 
there are many pretty glimpses of the city, the river, the bay ; and all the country 
may be seen through lovely frame-works of foliage. Druid Hill was once 
known as the largest pear orchard either in America or Europe, and on its west- 
ern and south-western slopes were forty thousand pear-trees, with six hundred 
varieties of that fruit upon them. A tract of country has been set apart for the 
establishment of a botanical garden. From the noble gateway on Madison 
avenue lead long walks and roads, adorned with ornamental summer-houses, 
marble statues, vases and urns ; water-ways dotted with swans and duck- 
lings ; lawns across which deer bound undisturbed, and a lake whose icy 
surface in winter is gay with thousands of skaters. On fine days streams of 
handsome equipages wend their way in procession to the centre of the park, 
where beauty and fashion pass in grand review. The distance to the central 
entrance-gate at Druid Hill from Charles and Baltimore streets, which are at 
present the most thickly-populated portions of the city, is two and a-half miles. 
Within the bounds of the park lies Druid lake, a mighty stone-wall reservoir 
which has a storage capacity of 493,000 gallons. This reservoir is only supple- 
mental, however, to the ample system of city water- works which draw their 
supplies from Lake Roland, six miles from the city, on the Northern Central 
*See Weishampel's " Stranger in Baltimore," 
49 



764 



PARKS, SQUARES, AND SUBURBS. 



railway. From this lake, which is seven miles in circumference, run conduits to 
Hampden and Mount Royal reservoirs. The city has recently purchased, at the 
cost of $350,000, the water rights of the Great Gunpowder river, and has already 
provided a supply of pure water for a population of a million inhabitants. The 
drives along Charles Street avenue, which leads from the city six miles out into a 
lovely wooded country sprinkled with fine villas and cottages to Lake Roland, 
to the Sheppard Asylum for the Insane, and to numerous other institutions, are 
all crowded in summer with lines of carriages and pedestrians. In Green Mount 
cemetery, at the junction of Belvidere street and North avenue, there are many 
beautiful monuments, and the grounds of Loudon park, Mount Olivet, Mount 
Carmel, and the " Western," all within short distances of the city, are beautifully 
laid out and planted with fine trees. 

Patterson park, in the eastern section of the city, is but small as compared 
with its gigantic neighbor of the west, but has been very handsomely adorned, 
and from it superb views of the harbor and of the mighty Chesapeake are to 
be had. 

The proposed enlargement of the city, which now covers but 10,000 acres, 
will embrace within Baltimore limits Clifton park, the site of the projected 
Hopkins University, and many pretty suburban villages into which manufacturing 
enterprise has already begun to penetrate. In addition to its parks, Baltimore 
has many beautiful public squares scattered throughout the different sections. 
In the western portion are Union, Franklin, and Harlem Squares, all surrounded 
by choice and commodious mansions. In the north-west is Lafayette Square ; 
in the centre stands the noble Monument Square ; in the north-east and the 
east Madison and Jackson Squares give shady refuges to the inhabitants, and 
the population in the southern portion flies from the summer heats to the cool 

breezes in Battery Square. 

The extension of the city 
limits is imperatively demanded 
by most of the citizens. The 
inhabitants are anxious to see 
the straggling villages, located 
within one or two miles of 
Baltimore's boundaries, com- 
pelled to contribute to the 
support of the metropolis from 
which they derive so many 
benefits. Their ambition, also, to 
rank Baltimore as the fourth city 
in the United States makes them 
anxious for increase of popula- 
tion, and many favor the annexation of the whole of Baltimore county, thus giving 
the city a chance for indefinite expansion. The old boundaries established by 
legislative enactment in 18 16 are ridiculously within the proper limits of the 
present metropolis. Waverley, a lively village north of Baltimore, and the former 




View of the Railroad and River, from the Mountains at 
Harper's Ferry. 



• THE RELAY HOUSE MONOCACY. 765 

seat of wealthy Maryland families ; Woodberry, under the shadow of Druid Hill, 
an extensive cotton and machine manufacturing point; Mount Washington, 
perched on picturesque hills within a few minutes' ride of Baltimore by the 
Northern Central railway ; Brooklyn, south-east of the city, possessing a land- 
locked harbor and a water-front nearly two miles in length ; Towsontown, 
Govanstown, and Picksville, the last noted as the location of one of the earliest 
built arsenals of the General Government, are all destined to come under the 
control of Baltimore. 

The school system of Baltimore is admirable, and will compare favorably 
with that of any community in the United States. The schools are under the 
control of a board of twenty commissioners, presided over by one chosen from 
their number and by the Superintendent of Schools and his assistants. The 
youth who passes through the primary and grammar schools and the City 
College of Baltimore, receives a liberal education. The total number of pupils 
enrolled in the public schools of the city in 1873 was 40,185 ; and the expendi- 
tures for white and colored schools, of which latter there are at present fifteen, 
amounted to nearly $500,000. The sexes are educated separately. The female 
high schools are the most admirable institutions of their kind in the South, and 
there are few in the North which equal them. The Baltimore City College, 
which has been granted $150,000 for the erection of a new building, has a high 
scholastic standard, and is eminently prosperous ; and the normal school for the 
education of teachers yearly sends forth many competent graduates. 

The press of Baltimore is enterprising in aiding to develop the commercial 
greatness of the city. The American, the Gazette, and the Sun, all have large 
and finely-equipped establishments. The American was founded in 1773 as the 
Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser ; the Sun and Gazette are younger. 
The Bulletin is a literary journal of much excellence. In Baltimore is also the 
office of the Southern Magazine, the only monthly periodical of any importance 
issued in the South. 

Leaving Baltimore by the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and crossing over 
Gwynn's Falls, on the superb Carrollton viaduct, the traveler will find at almost 
every turn a profusion of bold and romantic scenery. At Washington Junction, 
formerly known as the Relay House, a fine hotel has been erected by the railway 
company ; and in summer hundreds of youths and maidens, from Washington 
and Baltimore, angle for trout and for each other's hearts beside the little stream 
which comes down from the mountains. 

From the Thomas viaduct, the noble granite structure which spans the 
stream sixty-six feet above its bed, one can see the pretty village of Elkridge 
Landing. Time was when vessels of small tonnage from London used to come 
up the stream, which now would scarcely float a skiff, and anchor at Elkridge 
Landing to be loaded with tobacco. 

At Ellicott's Mills, a charming old town, the Patapsco river runs through a 
bold and rocky passage, and from the railroad one may see the huge mass of 
granite known as the Tarpeian Rock. At Mount Airy and at Frederick Junction 
there are many fine out-looks over the fertile valleys and broken hills. At Frede- 



766 



HARPER'S FERRY, WESTERN VIRGINIA. 



rick Junction, or as it is better known, Monocacy, one may visit the battle-ground 
where General Lew. Wallace made his gallant stand at the Monocacy bridge, on 
the 9th of July, 1864, and prevented the enemy from making a victorious 
advance upon Washington. 

From Frederick Junction a branch line of rail communicates with Frederick 
City, a well built town with broad, straight streets, bordered with stone mansions, 
and possessing many handsome churches and nourishing educational institutions. 
From Monocacy the Baltimore and Ohio railroad traverses the beautiful valley 
lying between the Monocacy river and the Catoctin mountains. At Point of 
Rocks, a bold promontory formed by the profile of the Catoctin mountain, 
whose base is washed by the Potomac on the Maryland side, the railroad passes 
through a tunnel drilled fifteen hundred feet into the solid rock. It traverses 
the battle-field at South Mountain, running at the foot of a precipice for three or 
four miles, and, passing Hagerstown Junction, enters the great gorge at Harper's 
Ferry. 

Thomas Jefferson immortalized Harper's Ferry by his words as John Brown 
did by his deeds. The rock on which Jefferson is said to have sat when he 
wrote his " Notes on Virginia " commands a fine view of the junction of the 
Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers, in the great gorge which forms one of 
the most picturesque bits of mountain scenery in the South. On either side 
of the eminence known as Cemetery Hill, on which Jefferson's Rock stands, 
rise up majestic mountains, rugged and difficult of access — the Maryland and 
Loudon Heights. The Maryland hills rise to 2,000 feet above the level of 
the sea, and the others are still clad in primitive forests, where the foot of man 
seldom treads. The Potomac, which rises in Western Virginia, and rushes 




Jefferson's Rock, Harper's Ferry. 



impetuously, like some mountain sprite, down through the Alleghanies, traverses 
the northern extremity of the valleys of West Virginia, and forms the boundary 
between that State and Maryland. 



HARPER S FERRY S LOCATION AND HISTORY. 



767 



On the rugged cliffs are various fancied shapes and faces, and travelers are 
invited to discover, in a rock on the Maryland side, a fanciful and certainly feeble 
resemblance to George Washington. 

The village of Harper's Ferry, before the war, contained 3,000 population, and 
was the site of a national armory, for which the immense water power rendered 
it valuable. When the late war broke out many of the old inhabitants cast 
their lot with the Confederacy, but great numbers also sided with the Govern- 
ment of the Union. The population has been materially changed, and to-day 
is composed of 1,600 whites and 700 blacks. The Baltimore and Ohio railroad 
has pushed its tracks across the Potomac at this point on a magnificent bridge, 
and the Winchester and Potomac railway has its northern terminus at Harper's 




Cumberland Narrows and Mountains. 

Ferry. The scenery along the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, Vhose banks the 
line of railway follows for many miles between Harper's Ferry and Washington, 
and by the rugged edges of the great cliffs westward from the little mountain 
town, is exceedingly fine. In summer a ride on the banks of this canal affords 
a constant succession of delicious landscapes, still-life pictures, and sweet vistas 
of romantic woodlands. 

Harper's Ferry was named after Mr. Robert Harper, a native of Oxford in 
England, who established the first ferry over the Potomac in the mountains, and 
who was shrewd enough to join the American colonists when they made their 
strike for freedom. The Ferry is said to have been chosen as the site of a 
national armory, in 1794, by General Washington himself. The establishments 



768 



REMINISCENCES OF WAR 



there were very extensive, and their ruins — for the buildings were burned during 
the war — extend for a long distance beside the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio 
railroad. 

In the little engine-house, still pointed out from the platform of the depot of 
the railway station, John Brown made his defense against the excited inhabitants 
and the Virginian militia when he was inaugurating his raid for the purpose of 
liberating the slaves of Virginia. The engine-house is a small brick building 
near the old armory gate, and the Government would do well to see that it is 
preserved as an historical memorial, for around it and from it was fought the 
first battle of the great war which finally raged for four years throughout the 
South. 

Not far from Harper's Ferry, on the Winchester and Potomac railroad, is the 
little hamlet of Charlestown, where John Brown was executed under the laws of 
the State of Virginia in 1859. Early in 1861 the armory buildings were burned, 
together with fifteen thousand stand of arms stored in them, to prevent the 
Confederates from profiting by their capture, and the Southern forces soon took 
possession of Harper's Ferry. Throughout the war it was occupied and 
re-occupied by the Union forces ; the heights around glistened with bayonets ; 
and the town has not yet fairly recovered from the demoralization consequent 
on its unfortunate condition during the civil struggle. Harper's Ferry was long 
the base of supplies for the armies of Banks and Fremont when they were 
operating against Stonewall Jackson in the Valley. In September of 1862 
there was a grand artillery duel between the opposing forces stationed on the 
heights, when Jackson and Hill attacked Harper's Ferry with their army corps. 
On that occasion the Maryland heights were abandoned by a Federal officer, who 

was cashiered for his misconduct, 



but killed by a shell shortly after 
he had given the order for the 
surrender of Harper's Ferry to the 
Confederates. 

The scene on the whole peninsula 
formed by the Potomac and Shenan- 
doah, at the time that McClellan's 
army was concentrated about Har- 
per's 5 Ferry, has been described as 
exceedingly fine. All the heights 
were aglow with thousands of watch- 
fires, and from Camp Hill, a ridge di- 
viding the villages of Harper's Ferry 
and Bolivar, one could hear the hum 
of voices, like the murmur of the 
ocean, rising up from the valleys and 
drifting- down from the mountains. 




Cumberland Viaduct, Maryland. 

The village clusters picturesquely among the sides of the steep hills ; no hum 
of spindles or plying of hammers disturbs its primitive quiet. An ancient flight 



FROM HARPER'S FERRY TO PITTSBURG. 



769 



of stone steps leads up to a quaint church on the hill-side, and beyond the path 
conducts the visitor to Jefferson's Rock. Hardly a quarter of a mile from the 
engine-house where John Brown struck the first blow for the freedom of the 
American slave, rise the walls of Storer College, an institution endowed by 
private munificence for the education of freedmen, and sending out every year, 
competent teachers of both sexes, who labor to educate the colored race. 

A short distance to the west, beyond Harper's Ferry, the Baltimore and Ohio 
railroad passes through a projecting rock in a tunnel eighty feet long, whence a 
magnificent view of the pass through the mountains to the confluence of the 
Potomac and Shenandoah is presented. The road also passes through Kearneys- 
ville in West Virginia, the scene of many sharp cavalry fights between Generals 
Pleasanton, Averill, Custer, and Merritt with the Confederates under Fitz Lee 
and Stewart, and within seven miles of Sharpsburg, whence the tourist can 
reach the celebrated battle-field of Antietam. 




Harper's Ferry, Maryland. 

Sharpsburg bears many marks of the great fight of 1862, and near the battle- 
field is a monument to the slaughter of those dread September days, in the 
shape of a fine national cemetery. 

Martinsburg, in West Virginia, on the line of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, 
was the scene of many Confederate raids, but is now a prosperous town, whose 
chief reliance is upon the extensive iron works established there by the railroad 
company. At St. John's Run travelers leave the rail for Berkley Springs, a 
favorite summer resort at the eastern base of the Warm Spring Ridge in West 
Virginia. At Cumberland one enters into the mountain region of the narrow 
western part of Maryland, and into the magnificent valley from which Baltimore 
draws its enormous coal trade. Cumberland is a handsome town with many fine 
churches and banks. It lies in a noble amphitheatre of mountains, and all around 
it and beyond it the scenery is very picturesque. 



77© 



THE ALLEGHANIES — CHEAT RIVER RINGWOOD TUNNEL. 



At Piedmont, twenty-eight miles beyond Cumberland, the foot of the Alle- 
ghanies is reached, and the road, climbing the mountains, passes Altamont on 
the extreme summit of the Alleghany ridge, where the streams divide, flowing in 
one direction toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the other toward the Atlantic ; then 
passes by pretty Oakland, a famous resort for summer tourists, and descends 
rapidly along high and precipitous embankments to the banks of the Cheat river, 
a turbulent mountain stream, whose waters are of sombre hue. 

For many miles beyond the Cheat river the road winds down the steep sides 
of the mountains, and, entering the great Western coal-fields, passes through the 
Ringwood tunnel, 4,100 feet long, and completed at the end of five years' labor 
at a cost of a million dollars. From the tunnel at Newburg, in Western Virginia, 
the railway line descends a steep hill-side, and thence finds its way through a 
country rich in coal and petroleum, but only sprinkled here and there by small 
and uninteresting villages, to Pittsburg, on the Ohio river. 

The old town of Annapolis, on the Severn, near Chesapeake, still the capital 
of Maryland, is the seat of the United States Naval Academy, established there 
in 1845. It was founded in 1649, an ^ in 1708, in honor of Queen Anne, its 
name was changed from Anne Arundel Town to the present one. It was at 
Annapolis that General Washington resigned his commission at the close of the 
Revolution. The State-House, and St. John's College, founded in 1784, are the 
only important public buildings. 

The present debt of the State, over and above its assets, is $6,219,172; but 
when the indebtedness of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company to* the 
commonwealth, which amounts to more than twenty million dollars, is trans- 
ferred from the schedule of unproductive assets to that of interest-paying 
securities, a fund will be furnished by which the entire State debt can be taken 
up. The last Legislature appropriated $50,000 for the establishment of schools 
for colored children, and a colored normal school is in excellent condition. 








■ ~ '-' ' ■ . l\\. '■■■ -*"• 



LXXXVI. 

SOUTHERN CHARACTERISTICS — STATE PRIDE — THE INFLUENCE 
OF RAILROADS — POOR WHITES — THEIR HABITS. 



WHILE I cannot agree with the amiable gentleman in Savannah who one 
day assured me that the people of the North and South were two 
distinct nations, and -that the time would come when they would separate, I 
still recognize essential differences between the inhabitants of the Northern and 
Southern States. These differences are not merely climatic ; they were inbred 
by the system and tendencies which have been so lately done away with. 
Between the citizen of Massachusetts and the dweller in South Carolina a broad 
and deep gulf so long existed, that it is not strange that the habits, the 
customs, and the language of the people should 
differ in many particulars. 

The first thing, however, which strikes the 
stranger as peculiar in visiting the Southern 
States is that the inhabitants of each State have 
remarkably distinguishing characteristics. 
Because one knows the Virginian character he 
cannot safely draw inferences as to that of the 
South Carolinian; because he has studied the 
types in the bayou regions of Louisiana he can- 
not presume to a knowledge of the Mississippian 
of the Gulf coast. In short, the variety of origin 
and ancestry in the Southern States has left 
indelible marks upon the populations. 

People in all the States, however, take what 
seems to Northern men, and also to the Euro- 
pean, overweening pride in their State, their 
county, and even the immediate neighborhood 
in which they were born. Nothing is more common than to hear a Southerner 
announce himself, on being introduced, as from a certain county, and he will 
very likely add that it is a section famed for certain excellences and for the 
valor of its inhabitants. This is not said from any motives of self-conceit, 
because the same man who vaunts the virtues of his neighbors will willingly 
compare himself unfavorably with them ; but it is due to a genuine love and 
a deep-seated affection for the soil. The Southerners have been so long 
emphatically an agricultural people, and have conquered at such expense and 
with such difficulty a great portion of the land which belongs to them, that they 




Southern Types — Come to Market 



77* 



THE SOUTHERNER'S ATTACHMENT TO HIS STATE. 



love it with an intensity and devotion equaled in the world only by the attach- 
ment of the Swiss peasant to his peaks and the Frenchman to his vineyard. 

The railroads which now penetrate the South in every direction, and the 
prosaic yet cosmopolitan " through routes " which, to Southern eyes, dash with 
such irreverent lack of compunction across State boundaries, and annihilate so 
recklessly all local sentiment, are doubtless doing much to annul the devotion to 
State rights. Curious travelers in the South have remarked that, as fast as a 
railroad penetrates a section, sentiment with regard to matters in the outside 
world becomes liberalized along the line. The current of through travel pouring 
over the great roadways from New York to New Orleans, and from the West and 
St. Louis to the Atlantic coast, has done much to shake that isolated indepen- 
dence once so conspicuous in the Southerner of the country regions, and to render 
him more like his bustling and active fellow-citizen of the -North and West. 

However much the hundred railroads covering the South with an iron net- 
work may do to destroy the old and too earnest attachment of each individual 





Southern Types — A Southern Plough Team. 

to his particular State and neighborhood, that attachment will still remain for 
many years one of the salient points of Southern character. Two gentlemen 
meeting upon a railway train often introduce themselves something after this 
fashion : 

" Are you from this State, sir?" 

"No, sir, I am from Kentucky, sir," or "Tennessee, sir," as the case may be; 
whereupon the first interlocutor immediately defines his nativity, and the two 
enter into an amicable discussion of political and social issues. It is not unusual 
for strangers thus meeting to inquire of each other the counties and even the 
towns in which they were respectively born, and from the gravity and dignity of 
their conversation, and the evident pride which each takes in detailing the 
advantages and peculiar blessings of his neighborhood, one might fancy them 
a couple of foreigners from distant lands who had accidentally met. As a rule, 
two Southerners traveling in a State remote from that in which they were born 
find an instant bond of communion in the fact that they are from the same 
commonwealth. 



THE TWO OLD CLASSES IN THE SOUTH. 



773 



Sometimes one sees on the cars or on the steamers a tall, lank Southerner 
anxiously inquiring if there be among the passengers any one from his native 
State ; and if he finds such a one, he goes to him with effusive friendship and 
adopts him as his comrade. A friend has told me a curious incident of this kind 
which he saw in a rough part of the South-west. While traveling on an obscure 
railroad in some forest, the car door opened; and a lank individual thrust his coun- 
tenance through the aperture, crying out in an appealing manner: "Is there 
any one heah from Tennessee?" No response being made, his voice was 
presently heard repeating the same inquiry in the neighboring car. 

There are, of course, several important facts to bear in mind when one is 
judging of the peculiarities of the Southern people. It should be remembered 




Southern Types — Negro Boys Shelling Peas. 

that there were but two classes in the South under the old system, the high up 
and the low down, Dives in his hall and Lazarus among the dogs at the gate, — 
the gentleman, planter and the ruffian, brawling, ill-educated, and generally 
miserable poor white. The negro did not count; he was a commodity, an 
article of barter, classed familiarly as "nigger;" had no identity; was supposed 
to possess little consciousness, moral or otherwise; and while practically he was 
every now and then treated with great kindness and forbearance by those who 
were his absolute masters, still he did nothing either to build up or solidify society. 
Now-a-days a middle class is gradually springing into existence, bridging the 
once impassable gulf between the "high up" and the "low down," and some of the 



774 THE "pore white' en voyage. 

more intelligent and respectable negroes are taking rank in this class. The low 
down element has perhaps received more benefit from the results of the war than 
has the negro or his master. 

The introduction' of manufactures here and there in the South has drawn into 
large towns some of the white population which was once utterly useless and 
degraded. A noteworthy instance which I have already mentioned is that of the 
hundreds of cleanly and handsome girls in the cotton-mills of Georgia. Many 
of them have been transformed from slouching, unkempt, and gawky country 
girls into tidy and thrifty operatives, with some little money in bank, and 
prospects of a social position far higher than they could ever have hoped to 
gain under the old system. 

The poor white still clings to many of his eccentricities. One finds an 
excellent chance to observe the peculiar habits of this class by traveling 
with the great current of emigration from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi 
south-westward to Arkansas and Texas. Now and then, in our long journeys 
from one end of the South to the other, we fell in with, and traveled for days in 
the company of, representatives of what was formerly the low down class. We 
chatted in the friendliest and freest manner with the pretty, soft-voiced girls from 
Alabama, as we rode across the great plains of Texas, and were no whit deterred 
from conversation by the fact that they dipped long pine sticks in yellow snuff, 
and chewed the sticks while they talked with us. Sometimes, however, we felt 
like remonstrating with the mothers who gave their children sticks from the 
family snuff-bottle, and taught them the disgusting habit. 

The men were almost without exception clad in homespun garments of a 
blue or butternut color, always neatly made. A slouch hat was their invari- 
able head-gear — a hat, too, which seemed to have undergone more than the 
ordinary vicissitudes, which one could never imagine to have had band or 
buckle or definite color — a hat much battered by the elements, and occa- 
sionally perforated with buckshot. Out of ten thousand people of this class, 
not one had in his face a particle of color; all had the same dead, pallid 
complexion. The women whom we saw, and who were doubtless fair speci- 
mens of their class, were, when young, quite pretty; gracious, but exceedingly 
timid. On the whole, when the snuff-stick was laid by, and their lustrous 
brown eyes were playing at hide-and-seek with thought, they seemed charming 
as Italian peasant girls, or maids of Marseilles ; but when from their sweet 
lips came the flat and harsh accents of their native mountains and plains, the 
illusion was dispelled. 

My observation justifies me in the conclusion that the poor white always 
has a numerous family. It was not at all uncommon to see lean fathers 
and lank and scrawny mothers entering the cars, followed by a brood of 
ten or more children of all sizes. There was something touching, too, in the 
rough sympathy and helpfulness of the members of these families one for 
another, during their long and weary journeys. The little girls, whose thin but 
pretty faces were hidden beneath sun-bonnets, and the rough boys, with fists like 
sledge-hammers, and faces drawn down with wrinkles of fever and ague, each 



POOR WHITES AS FELLOW-TRAVELERS. 



775 



carried some bundle of household gear; the mother usually bore a basket 
containing a ham, some coarse corn-bread, and, mayhap, a package of fruit, as 
well as the snuff-bottle; and the father bore the family rifle, its long barrels 
weather-stained and rusty. 

The ignorance and timidity of these poor people, during their journeys 
to new homes, was painful as well as ludicrous to witness. Sometimes a family 
on entering a car would stand utterly bewildered, not seeming to know whether 
to sit or slink into a corner, until the conductor, or the " captain," as he is called 
in the South, marshaled them to seats. On one occasion, being startled by the 
pressure of a brawny hand on my shoulder, I turned to confront the father of an 
interesting family of eleven, who, pointing to his wife, said in a hoarse whisper : 

" Stranger, the captain did n't give her no yaller ticket ; I reckon he done 
forgot." 

Then showing me the yellow check which the conductor had given him 
in return for his ticket, he earnestly inquired the meaning of the lettering 
upon it. Surprised that a man whose appearance 
indicated intelligence of no mean order could not 
read, I ventured to ask him if such was the case, and 
if his family was unable to read or write. I found that no 
member of the party had the slightest acquaintance with 
anything educational, and that in the whole course of 
half a century of toil, the old man had rarely been more 
than ten miles from home. Now he was about to try 
the far-away plains of Texas, and he looked forward to 
it as a mighty change. The future seemed a great gulf 
before him, and he informed me, with the ghost of a sigh, 
as he shifted his tobacco from one cheek to the other, 
that he never would have believed "befo* the surrendah" 
that he could have undertaken a wholesale emigration. 

Few people who have not wandered up and down the 
highways and byways of the South can appreciate the 
immensity of the emigration from the old cotton States to 
the extreme South-west. That Texas will speedily have 
a vast population, drawn from these cotton States, and bitterly necessitous in. 
matters of education and elevation, there is no doubt. The destiny of these 
poor whites, who have fled before the changed order of things in their homes, is 
somewhat uncertain. If they could but acquire habits of solid industry, and 
learn to accumulate in their rough way some little surplus means, they might 
easily be redeemed from their present degraded condition ; but Texas is vast, the 
means of living easily to be had there, and so it is to be feared that the mass 
of the poor white race will be improved in little except its material condi- 
tion. Those who remain at home are certainly, as I have said, improving as 
a whole ; yet the Sand-hillers of South Carolina, the Crackers of Georgia and 
Florida, the wretched masses along the lowlands of the Atlantic coast, 
and the mountaineers in some portions of Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, and. 




Southern Types — A "Likely 
Girl" with her Baby. 



776 



OTHER PHASES OF STATE PRIDE. 



Western North Carolina, present many discouraging signs. In some cases, they 
do not advance as rapidly as does the negro ; but the latter, immediately after 
the war, had a great incentive to a rapid growth, and it was to be expected that 

he would improve his newly-acquired 
opportunity. I do not think the mass 
of poor whites really appreciated the 
immense difference which the war 
effected in their social position, nor 
will they thoroughly understand it for 
many years to come — not until the 
progress of events under the new 
regime has wiped out the old aristoc- 
racy, and brought its genuine leveling 
influence wholly to bear. Should 
immigration make as great progress 
in the other States of the South as it 
is now making in Virginia, there will, 
of course, be a radical change in the 
character of the poor white population. 
We may expect in a few years, as the 
country fills up, and the persistent 
idlers are crowded to the wall, to see 
the Southern poor white transformed 
into an industrious and valuable mem- 
ber of society. The pride of State, heretofore alluded to, has doubtless made it 
much harder for the native Southerner to emigrate than it would have been 
for citizens of other sections. I shall not readily forget the intense delight with 
which a Mississippian, returning from a disastrous colonization experiment in 
Brazil, hailed the bluffs and the rose- embowered gardens of beautiful Natchez 
as we drew near to them one spring evening. 

"Thar," he said, "is ez good a country ez the sun shines on, and if all them 
cussed fools as went to the Brazils was hyar now, they would say so too. Give 
me old Mississippi in mine." 

The affection for the State as distinguished from the section was shown 
all through the late war. When we were called upon to listen to the recital 
of battles, in which, by the way, it was noteworthy that the Confederates always 
won, we remarked the pride and dignity with which the superior excellences of 
any special State in question were asserted. In fact, we learned to believe that 
the Southerner often thinks, as the Englishman said of all Americans, that 
'"he is as good as any one else, and better too." 




fJJ'i' 

Southern Types — Catching his Breakfast. 



LXXXVII. 

THE CARRYING OF WEAPONS — MORAL CHARACTER OF THE 

NEGROES. 



SOME people are inclined to place a good deal of stress upon the supposed 
fact that the mass of Southern males carry weapons, and that their sense 
of honor is so highly wrought that their conversation is guarded. While it must 
be admitted that great numbers of Southerners habitually go armed, and that 
in some States they are prone to fight on small provocation, my experience 
has been that the most cultured and refined gentlemen rarely bear a weapon, 
and scoff at the idea of the necessity of -carrying one. 
In our journeys, we traveled not unfrequently in regions 
remote from the railroads, or along rivers, where the 
people were somewhat rough, but never on any occasion 
did we see pistol or knife drawn or displayed during our 
fourteen months' stay in the South. 
While, however, we never saw 
weapons displayed, we heard plenty 
of stories to confirm the impression 
that large classes carried them and 
used them freely. 

There is no doubt that a great 
proportion of the Southern people 
believe that they must avenge any 
fancied slight upon their honor by 
personal punishment of the indi- 
vidual who has offered it, and so 
they have recourse to the revolver 
and the knife, where the Northern 
man would carry the case into the 
courts. The worst phase of the 
Southern character is illustrated in 
the unwillingness to adopt legal 
methods in the settlement of dis- southern T yP es-Negro shoeblacks. 

putes. Under the regime of reconstruction the juries of the Federal Courts 
are detested, appeals to them being considered a greater ignominy than those 
to the State Courts. The higher class of gentlemen rarely settle disputes by 
shooting or stabbing, but it is probable that the only thing which will restrain the 
rougher whites from a practice unworthy of our civilization, and from ideas of 




yy8 NEGROES CARRY SHOT-GUNS. 

personal satisfaction which are alike murderous and contemptible, will be the 
progress of education. 

It is, perhaps, too true that the recent accession of the Democrats to power 
in Texas and Arkansas has increased the number of misdeeds there. That the 
Democratic party in the South is the party of law and order is by no means 
strictly true ; the leaders of the Democratic party are unfortunately people of 
inflammable methods of speech, and often,, in the excitement of political 
harangues, give advice which their rude followers interpret to suit themselves, 
and which sometimes results in bloodshed. The public, however, should be 
extremely careful not to judge of the Southern character by the greatly exagger- 
ated accounts of outrages with which many political newspapers are filled during 
the progress of a campaign. The fact that in a journey of 25,000 miles, nearly 
a thousand of which I traveled on horseback, through mountain regions, I 
saw no weapons drawn, and not a single instance oX assault, lynching, or even 
drunken brawls, ought to be considered as good testimony in favor of the 
Southerners. The Northern people in their judgment are too apt to confuse 
the classes, and it is undoubtedly true that in some parts of the North prejudiced 
persons still fancy the South a barbarous region infested with ruffians of the old 
border type. 

The negroes certainly rejoice in the possession of weapons to a large extent. 
Since the war every black man has felt himself called upon to own a shot-gun, 
but to his credit be it said that very rarely in his history as a freedman has he 
been guilty of the murder of white people for purposes of vengeance. He is 
deterred in a large measure from the greater crimes to which his ignorant condi- 
tion and lack of moral training may impel him by the certainty of punishment, 
just as he is deterred in some of the States, where he has not political power, 
from petty and grand larceny. When traveling through sparsely settled regions 
in many of the Southern States one may generally leave his personal property 
unprotected by lock or key. The negro will not steal it. In some of the States 
petty larceny by negroes is punished with undue severity, in imitation of the 
barbarous English sentences which send a man to jail for eighteen months for 
taking a loaf of bread. Rape and similar crimes, of which in all the States 
negroes are occasionally guilty, are invariably punished with death ; and the 
rape, justly considered a capital offence by all nations, is almost always avenged 
at the hands of Judge Lynch. 

The negro is far from being a savage, even in his most degraded condition. 
Whiskey, however, operates as badly upon him as upon the whites ; it prompts 
him to an indiscriminate use of the revolver and the knife, when, if he were in his 
sober senses, he would be contented with a solid bout at fisticuffs. The negro, 
however, rarely cherishes a feud for many years, as the low whites do. Hi:; 
vengeance is prompt, or his careless nature leads him, if he delays, to forget it. 
No Southern man, even when surrounded by a hundred negroes politically 
hostile to him on any remote plantation, fears for his life. A kind of tacit 
confession of his superiority pervades his dusky dependents, and he might kill 
half-a-dozen of them without incurring any danger of Lynch law. In the 



MORAL GRADES AMONG THE BLACKS. 



779 



cities where the negroes flock together idly and become more vicious than 
in the country, occasional cutting and shooting among themselves are not 
uncommon ; and now and then when a white man kills one of their number, they 
resent the slaughter by riot, but they rarely bring the offender to justice. It 
would, I think, be perfectly fair to say that not half-a-dozen white men have 
been hung in the South since the war, for the murder of negroes. I believe 
conviction for such a crime would be quite impossible in the present state of 
opinion in some Southern States. 

That there is a large class of negroes who are intrinsically mean and 
gravitating steadily downward toward the worst phases of rascality, there is no 




Southern Types — A Little Unpleasantness. 

doubt. About one-third of the negroes in the South is in a very hopeful 
condition ; another third seems to be in a comparatively stationary attitude ; 
another third is absolutely good for nothing, prefers theft to honest labor, and 
makes no steady progress in morality, refinement, or education of any kind. 
The religion of the negroes in many parts of the South appears pretty 
completely divorced from morality. 

It is difficult to persuade one's self that the blacks as yet deserve recognition 

as a moral race. Their best friends will admit that, though very religious, they 

are also very immoral. Adultery, which is a mortal sin among the Northern 

and Southern white religionists, is simply venial to the black man. His conver- 

50 



780 



THE NEGRO'S CONSCIENCE. 



sion to the religion of the Lord does not seem to build up the negro's conscience. 
The tough moral fibre of the Anglo-Saxon, which came only by slow growth, is 
not perceptible in the negro ; neither could it be expected, considering that he 
was brought from the jungles of Africa into a comparatively wild region in 
America, and that, under the dominion of slavery, his moral growth was but 
lazily helped. That the negro has made progress no one will be inclined to 
dispute, but he started from such a low and bestial condition that he has as yet 
reached only the confines of real Christianity. He tries to be a good Christian, 
and yet is not always satisfied with one wife. He is not restrained by the 
fear of what people will say of him, as the whites universally are. The moral 






Southern Types — "Going to Church." 

tone of all his fellows is so low, the temptations to occasional lapses from virtue 
on the part of his spiritual advisers of his own color are often so great, that it is 
not astonishing that his backslidings are frequent. His idea is that salvation is 
attained by shouting. The Anglo-Saxon believes that salvation can only be 
attained by self-denial, faith, and hard work. In some parts of the South the 
negro, while under conviction, goes into spasms, and is unfit for his daily duties. 
If he is a cook he spoils the dinner, and if he is a field-hand his master finds 
occasion to complain of him. In Virginia, and doubtless in many other States, 
the negro alludes to this spiritual condition as being " in the wilderness." 



RELIGIOUS EXERCISES. 



7 8l 



He has found no peace, he cannot profess to be converted until he sees a great 
light, hears a voice from Heaven, and has a visitation from an angel of God. 
Then his spirit is filled at once with brightness and light, and in the public 
revival-meetings he often jumps six feet into the air, embraces with effusion 
all the deacons and ministers, and in some of the States he is not considered 
as converted unless he can say this formula : 

" The Lord has taken my feet out of the miry clay and set them on the rock of ages, where 
the very gates of hell shall not prevail against them." 

If the brother or sister under conviction cannot say this phrase exactly, the 
preachers and deacons will tell them that they are not yet out of the wilderness, 
and will refuse to admit them to religious communion. 

All the negro meetings which I attended were marked by intense 
convulsions of the muscles on the part of all the people present. Even the 
best educated colored ministers seemed to rely upon theatrical contortions 
of face, and mighty stampings of feet and waving of arms, for effect on the 
congregations. Listening outside the open windows of a negro church in 
Florida one evening, I heard the 
preacher furiously pounding the Bible 
which lay on the sacred desk. His 
words were incoherent, his logic was 
sadly at fault ; some of his appeals 
seemed ludicrous, but every thump on 
the holy volume brought a tempest of 
shoutings, sighs, and moans from the 
dusky hearers. On the plantations the 
camp-meetings and revivals sometimes 
totally unfit the negroes for labor dur- 
ing the whole week. Men and women 
foam at the mouth, wander about the 
fields and forests half distracted, a 
spasm of spiritual insanity having 
taken possession of them. In such 
moments of rare enthusiasm they 
sometimes descend to orgies ; whiskey 
and licentiousness do their work, and 
the whole meeting will be transformed 
into an assembly of blackamoor 
maenads and satyrs. A clever Nor- 
therner, who has for many years 
dwelt in the South, once told me that 
he considered the Christianity of the negro as Fetichism with a Christian cloak on. 

This may seem a hard and unfriendly judgment of negro character, but the 
careful observer who studies the characteristics of the whole black population 
will yet not fail to see signs of encouragement. He will discover that a mighty 




Southern Types — A Negro Constable. 



782 AN AMUSING EXAMPLE. 

.uplifting has really been going on since 1865, and that an influx of good teachers, 
who shall teach industry, thrift, continence, and self-respect, will in another 
decade raise the four and a-half million negroes in the South to pretty near the 
level of Christian manhood and womanhood. Such discouraging views of the 
negroes in the Gulf States as are taken by many of the native whites, are the 
result of a mistaken judgment. Even Caucasian ministers of the gospel, whose 
hearts are supposed to be filled with chanty for and faith in all men, refuse to see 
any tendency on the part of poor Sambo to improve his advantages. They do 
not seem to understand that moral growth is slow, and that so long as the negro 
remains in ignorance, and, in a measure, uncertain as to his future condition, he 
will not develop very rapidly. 

Traveling one day from Jackson to Grenada in Mississippi, I observed a 
bright, intelligent- looking negro woman seated near me in the smoking-car which 
I had entered for a moment. By her side was her little girl, three or four years 
of age. At one of the wayside stations a smart mulatto man entered the car, 
and, being acquainted with the young woman, speedily addressed her thus : 

"Why, Sister Smith, how is you ?" 

"Why, Brudder Brown, tol'able, thank you; how is yourself?" 

" I 's tol'able; always tol'able, thank you." 

" Is you quite sho' you is tol'able ?" 

" Oh, yas; I 's tol'able, very tol'able, thank you." 

" Whar is you gwine, Brudder Brown ?" 

" Oh, I 's gwine up hyar to 'tend a meeting ; is dat your little gal, Sister 
Smith ?" 

"Yas, dat 's my little gal." 

" How is your little gal, Sister Smith ?" 

" Oh, she is tol'able, thank you, very tol'able; is your children tol'able ?" 

"Yas, yas thank you." 

" Is you married, Sister Smith ?" 

"No, Lor! I is n't married; what would I be married for?" 

"Whar did you get dat little gal, Sister Smith ?" 

" Dat 's one I done foun', Brudder Brown ; " whereupon the two indulged in a 
sympathetic giggle. 

But the teachers of the various Freedmen's Aid and Missionary Associations, 
as well as Southern people of high character, such as the daughters of Christian 
ex- Confederate soldiers, who do not count it a shame to teach the ignorant 
negro, are gradually shaping opinion favorable to marriage among the blacks ; 
and while great numbers of ex-slaves still prefer the old fashion of living together 
so long as they can agree, without having any sacred compact between them, 
they feel that they still have a duty toward their offspring, and illegitimate birth 
is slowly becoming among the blacks, as among the whites, a cause for reproach. 

In many of the States until very recently, the railroad stations had rooms 
over the doors of which were signs marked, "For colored people only." But 
this odious distinction against race is, I believe, gradually dying out. I do not 
remember to have noticed it often. In some sections of Georgia it may perhaps 



THE BLACKS DO NOT OCCUPY FIRST-CLASS CARS. 783 

still be seen, but I would not affirm that it is general even in that State. 
Negroes and whites, however, do not ride together in the same railway cars, 
in those States where the blacks are absolutely masters of the political situa- 
tion, nor do I believe that the whites would tolerate the admission of the black 
race to' an equal share in the first-class accommodations of travel. The blacks 
usually buy second-class tickets, and as the Southern railroads are very poor in 
rolling stock, black men and black women are crowded together into smoking- 
cars of trains where the white men who enter to smoke, pay as little attention to 
the etiquette of travel as if no members of the female sex were present. There 
is an occasional outburst on the part of the whites when an aggressive negro 
attempts to assert his right to a berth in a sleeping-car or to enter a first-class 
carriage. 

In South-western Virginia I once entered the smoking-car of a through 
train, and was suddenly accosted in a fierce manner by an intelligent looking 
mulatto who inquired if I was born in the South, and if I ever owned slaves. 
Responding in the negative, he began a violent harangue against the railroad 
authorities, saying that it made his blood boil to be refused a first-class ticket; 
that he was from Tennessee, and as good as any white man, and added very 
bitterly that he was "damned if he appreciated it." He was well dressed, 
cleanly, and appeared decently educated. In a New York horse-car, room would 
have been made for him even on a crowded seat, but the Southern people disHke 
to establish a precedent for the admission of the colored race to the same facili- 
ties of travel enjoyed by the whites. 

In Louisiana and South Carolina the negroes do from time to time monopo- 
lize the trains, and create disturbance when their presence is objected to ; but if 
they insisted upon it as a general thing the whites would arm themselves and 
speedily check any such aggression. The negroes as a mass have not, however, 
even where their civil rights are practically gained, been difficult to manage in 
this delicate matter. They avoid a collision with white prejudices as much as 
possible ; as great numbers of them are ragged and engaged in menial occupa- 
tions, their presence in a car where elegantly- dressed ladies and gentlemen are 
seated would certainly be far from agreeable, and they recognize this fact quite 
as readily as they could be expected to do. Until they have gained much 
more property than they at present possess as a class, they will not be likely to 
secure the recognition of their equality,, which they certainly desire, however 
little they may assert it. 



LXXXVIII. 

DIALECT — FORMS OF EXPRESSION — DIET. 

THE noticeable differences in dialect and mode of expression between the 
North and South have been noted, caricatured, and exemplified hundreds 
of times. The lower class of Southern whites have undoubtedly caught some 
methods of speech, and certain fatal defects of pronunciation, from the negro. 





Southern Types — The Wolf and the Lamb in Politics. 

Sometimes, as we have seen in South Carolina, the rude and coarse dialect of the 
plantation hand, who never in his long life had an instant's education, is reflected 
in the speech of the haughty and high-bred gentleman's son. But this will no 
longer be so. The intimate communion which was possible in the days of 
slavery between the white and the black is now, for a dozen obvious reasons, 
impossible. The intermixture of dialects is as sure to be stopped as the com- 
mingling of bloods. Competent observers say that miscegenation was nearly 



SEPARATION BETWEEN THE RACES. 785 

ended by the war and the emancipation of the slave; that the social equality 
which certain of the whites in the South now seem to fear has been rendered 
impossible by the very event which established the independence of the negro. 
The two races are steadily drifting apart, so far as all intimate association is 
concerned. 

No one can doubt that the negro who was born a slave still retains the pro- 
foundest respect for, and in general also a kind of admiration with regard to, his 
late master; but, except on remote plantations where, thus far, but small change in 
the habits and customs of the natives has resulted from the war, the white and 
black children do not associate in the friendly comity of old ; a kind of barrier 
seems to have been erected between them, and it is but right it should be so. 
There seems no reason for believing that the negro cherishes any insane desire 
to promote miscegenation. There is a tendency in some sections of the South 
among the full-blacks to marry, as the whites phrase it, "above their color," or, 
as the negro himself would express it, "into America, and not back into Africa." 
A jet black man often shows a marked preference for a mulatto woman, and a 
full-black girl will not hesitate long in expressing her preference for a smart 
yellow boy of the modified and subdued African type over the thick-lipped, 
long-heeled negro who may also be enamored of her charms. A pupil in one 
of the Virginia schools for the colored people told a teacher that of her two 
suitors she liked the character of the one who was jet black the best, but that, 
altogether, she preferred the mulatto who also wooed her, because of his color 
and his refinement. But the full-blacks are gradually beginning to assert them- 
selves, and certainly in South Carolina, and in many other sections, they have as 
much pride of race as has the haughty Caucasian. 

Just how much influence the incapacity of the negro to pronounce many 
of our English words has had upon the speech of the Southern people it 
would be difficult to say. It is not probable that the masses in the lower 
class at the South would feel flattered if told that their speech much re- 
sembles that of the Africans. It may be said without exaggeration that all 
classes of Southerners find it impossible to pronounce the letter "r." They 
seem to have the same difficulty that the Parisian has in giving it its full 
roundness and completeness. Such words as "door" and "floor," and "before," 
are transformed into "do"' "flo"' and " befo'" by the lower class, while some 
educated and refined people pronounce them " doah," "floah," and almost 
invariably allude to our late unpleasantness as the "waw." The use of " I 
reckon," for "I guess," or " I think," is, of course, universal. Now and then the 
Southerner says " I calculate," or "I allow," but rarely "I guess," or " I think," 
unless in delicate deference to his Northern visitor. 

The highly educated people of the South speak an elegant and chaste 
English, in which, by the way, they take an especial pride. The planter, the 
city merchant, the factor, the professional man of eminence, the lawyers and 
physicians, the doctors, and even the country squires, judges, and militia 
colonels, all are distinguished for an exactness and nicety in the use of lan- 
guage which is very agreeable. There is a refinement and courtesy in the 



786 UNAMIABLE TYPES ODDITIES OF EXPRESSION. 

manners of the country gentlemen, and an absence of anything like a relapse 
into the slang of the day, or familiar forms of expression, which are perhaps 
more noticeable in the North and West than in the South. 

The joking and chaffing so common among acquaintances, and even strangers, 
in many parts of the North, is not understood at the South, and a Southerner 
will often fancy his dignity seriously offended by some sally which would pass 
unnoticed among other people. There is also an occasional undue assumption 
of dignity on the part of employes in public offices. 

On one occasion, remonstrating with a clerk in the office of a Texas stage 
company because he demanded the moderate sum of four dollars and a-half in 
gold for transporting my trunk eighty miles, he flew into a towering passion and 
inquired if "I meant to tell him that he lied." Nothing would have been easier 
than to quarrel with him, yet a moment afterward he was convinced that my 
inquiry was justifiable. 

A Northern gentleman, venturing to question the price of a telegram in the 
office of the telegraph company in a Mississippi town, was haughtily reminded 
by the chief clerk that he did n't allow his statements to be questioned. This 
excess of individualism, however, is perhaps a mark of provincial manners quite 
as much as of Southern breeding, and does not in any sense apply to the 
educated and refined Southerner. 

To note the characteristics of the South properly, one would be compelled 
to classify them by States, as the citizen of Maryland would be loth to admit 
the justness of a judgment which would be reasonable with regard to Texas, and 
the Virginian would repel with indignation the assumption that he has a few 
traits which might very properly be ascribed to the people of Louisiana. 

Recurring to the matter of speech and its peculiarities in the Southern States, 
it may be said that it is among the poor whites that eccentricities are mainly 
found. 

The Union soldiers brought home with them an inexhaustible fund of stories 
illustrating the dialect of these people, and relate with gusto the anecdote of the 
venerable Georgia cracker dame, who, when a company of Kentucky Confeder- 
ate cavalry passed her house, inquired : 

"Be you-uns kim all the way from Kintuck, critter back, to fight for 
we-uns?" 

The use of "we-uns" and "you-uns" is very noticeable in North Carolina and 
Eastern Tennessee, both in the mountains and valleys. The same thickness of 
pronunciation in certain words which is remarkable in the West, but never in the 
East, as in the words "there" and "where," and "here," which become, "thar," 
"whar" and "hyar," are observable among the lower classes in the South. 

There are also certain shibboleths by which the traveler from south of Mason 
and Dixon's line is always marked in the North and in Europe. These are the 
before-mentioned inability to give the letter "r" its due, and the transformation 
of such words as "car" into " cyah." 

Some waggish Northern critic has asserted that the mass of ex-slave-holders 
find great difficulty in pronouncing the word "negro," from their long habit of 



VAGUE IDEAS OF DISTANCE. 



787 



alluding to the black man only as a " nigger," and that they now-a-days call 
him a "niggro." But I suspect that there is a spice of malice in this hyper- 
critical statement. 

The use of "I don't reckon" sometimes strikes one unpleasantly, coming, as 
it often does, at the end of a sentence. "Right smart" is used in a variety of 
ways never employed at the North. The Southerner says, "We shall have a 
right smart crop this season," or, "There was a right smart of people at the last 
meeting," or, "I shall have a right smart chance of business." "Right" is used 
pretty generally throughout the South in the sense in which Northerners use 
" very." Of a lady they say that she is right pretty, of a fruit that it is right 
good, of scenery that it is right magnificent. 




• 



Southern Types — Two Veterans Discussing the Political Situation. 

With regard to distance, there seems in the back-country a charming disre- 
gard of actual measurement. The negro is especially vague in his statements as 
to the number of miles between any two towns. He will either tell you that it is 
a "right smart distance," or may state that it is "two good looks and a dog 
bark," or that it is "a hop, skip, and a go-so." This would hardly be credited 
unless one heard it. The negro was, up to the date of the war, intensely local 
in feeling. The boundary of his little neighborhood was to him the horizon 
where the world stopped, and, traveling but little, he got but slight idea of 
distances. In some portions of the Southern mountains we found the whites were 



788 A CURIOUS FORM OF ASSENT. 

very familiar with distances in their own State and counties, but not outside of 
those limits. The chief difficulty in obtaining accurate information from the 
negroes seemed to be their disinclination to assertion. A visitor to the Virginia 
springs noted as curious that the negroes there would not, as a rule, dissent 
from remarks by white people. If asked, " Does this stream run up hill?" the 
negro would be apt to say: " Yas, sah, reckon it do, sah;" but if the question 
were put in a leading form, as: "This stream runs down hill, of course, does it 
not?" he would say: "Sartinly, sah." 

The use of the word "stranger," as applied to an individual whose name one 
is not familiar with, so common in the extreme West, we found to prevail among 
the mountain populations of the South, but so far as my observation went, no- 
where else. Sometimes the natives whom we encountered would say, " Mistah," 
and pause, as if expecting you to supply your name. If you did not do so they 
would inquire, "What did you say your name was," or more frequently, "What 
mout your name be?" A curious form of assent, which must be heard to be 
appreciated, and which Dickens caricatured mercilessly when he first visited this 
country, prevails in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee and Western North 
Carolina. The following will serve as an example: 

While discussing the outer world with old Parson Caton, in a remote mount- 
ain district of Tennessee, he inquired if New York was not a right smart place, 
and being assured that it was, he said with a rising inflection, "Yes, sir?" 
Whereupon I responded, "Yes, sir." "As likely a place as Louisville, I 
reckon," he added ; to which I answered, " Yes, sir," he chiming in interroga- 
tively, " Yes, sir ? " 

These mountain peculiarities of speech demand more study than we were 
able to give them. They strike the visitor at first very strangely, but he 
gradually becomes accustomed to them. They differ considerably from the 
barbarous nasal Yankee slang spoken in certain sections of New England, but 
they have, nevertheless, many points of resemblance to it. "There is nowhere 
in the South any such conspicuous difference from Northern habits of speech 
as is found between the dialects of the French peasants living in two towns near 
each other. Some of the mountaineers speak of "hit," instead of "it," and 
emphasize the word as in this case: "I meant to have brought my gun, but 
I forgot hit." 

Words of endearment between husband and wife in the South often show 
an unconscious borrowing from the negroes. Where the Northern husband 
habitually calls his wife "dear" or "darling," the Southern man says "honey," 
alike to his spouse and to his offspring. 

The negro in South Carolina, and in other adjacent States, shows a tendency 
to render the English language more musical than it is when spoken by Anglo- 
Saxons. He gives an extra syllable to words which end abruptly, and puts a 
kind of rhythm into all that he says. The Virginia negro, especially when he 
shows the influence of mixed blood, copies the speech of the whites as nearly as 
possible, making some ludicrous errors when he attempts to catch the sonorous 
refrain of long words. He still speaks of people who impress him favorably as 



NEGRO WIT. 789 

" quality folk," and now and then, when disdainfully describing some unimpressive 
people, will denominate them "white trash," or even admit that they are " worse 
than niggers." Entering Barnum's Hotel, in Baltimore, one evening, I found the 
colored bell-boys gathered round an old negro servant, who was reading from 
the evening paper some instance of unparalleled meanness which a white man 
had been guilty of. After he had finished the anecdote he said: "Boys, dat 's — 
dat 's real niggerism," thus expressing his contempt for the conduct of the white 
man in question. 

In Natchez, on the Mississippi, I noticed that some of the white children, 
even those who attended private schools and were evidently kept from street 
communion with the negroes as much as possible, copied the defects of the 
colored man's speech. Our landlord's son, for instance, pointing to our carriage 
which had arrived at the door, said: "Da he," which was plantation slang for 
"There it is." Since the negroes gained their freedom, those among them who 
had been servants of wealthy gentlemen, and who had consequently been 
thrown into the company of white people, speak very good English, except 
when they endeavor to use long words, when they sometimes mix their meanings. 

In San Antonio I saw an officer of the garrison handing some invitations 
for a reception to the old darkey who was to distribute them through the town. 

"Now, Uncle," he said, "mind you do this promptly." "Yes, sah, " said 
the old man, "I will regenerate dem," meaning that he would distribute 
them. 

Here and there the polite black servants in the first class hotels hinted that 
" remuneration, " instead of " remuneration," would be agreeable. The negro is 
almost as quick of wit of a certain kind as the Irish peasant. He is disposed, as 
European servants are, to presume upon the good-natured familiarity of his 
superiors in position, and serves one best when a dignified and distant demeanor 
is maintained toward him. 

At Lynchburg we noticed that " Charles," one of the colored waiters, black 
as the traditional ace of spades, and very clumsy withal, made extravagant 
professions of his willingness to serve us, but managed to make his fellow- servant, 
" Harry, " do all the work. I therefore ventured a remark something in this 
wise : 

" It appears to me, Charles, that Harry does all the waiting and you do all 
the talking." 

" Yas, sah," he answered, civilly but quickly, "I does de talkin', and de 
smokin' too, when de gemmen gives me cigars." 

After that we considered Charles incorrigible. 

The negro valet, taught by years of experience under the slave system, is 
probably the best in the world. He is always civil, attentive, deferential, and 
adheres to his master's fortunes, good or ill, with remarkable tenacity. It is not 
from him that you will hear complaints of his old position. Indeed he looks 
backward half regretfully to the days of the slave-holders' domination, and 
often gazes with proud scorn upon the struggling blacks who are playing 
fantastic tricks in the political world. 



VQO ON THE PORT ROYAL ISLANDS. 

The teachers on the Port Royal islands, in South Carolina, in the book 
called " Slave Songs of the United States," give many interesting instances of 
what is probably the most remarkable negro dialect in the South. They say 
that, "With these people the process of 'phonetic decay' appears to have gone as 
far, perhaps, as is possible, and with it an extreme simplification of etymology 
and syntax. There is, of course, the usual softening of th and v, or /, into d 
and b ; likewise a frequent interchange of v and w, as v'eeds and veil, for weeds 
and well ; woices and pumkin wine, for voices and pumpkin vine. ' De wile' 
(vilest) sinner may return.' This last example illustrates also their constant 
habit of clipping words and syllables, as lee 1 bro\ for little brother ; plant shun, 
for plantation. The lengthening of short vowels is illustrated in both these (a, 
for instance, rarely has its short English sound) ' Een (in) dat mornin' all day.' 

" Strange words are less numerous in their patois than one would suppose, 
and, few as they are, many of them may be readily derived from English words. 
Besides the familiar bnckra, and a few proper names, as Cuffy, Quash, and 
perhaps Cudjo, I only know of churray (spill) which may be ' throw' way ; ' 
ouna or ona, ' you' (both singular and plural, and used only for friends), as 
' Ona build a house in Paradise ; ' and aw, a kind of expletive, equivalent to ' to 
be sure,' as, 'Dat clot' cheap.' 'Cheap aw.' 'Dat Monday one lazy boy.' 
' Lazy aw — I 'bleege to lick 'em.'" 

These interesting quotations illustrate the linguistic peculiarities of the South 
Carolina negro. It is supposed that the fashion which the negroes in all parts 
of the South have of speaking of their elders as uncles and aunts, or as daddy 
and mammy, arose originally from a feeling of respect, and as they were not 
allowed to call each other Mr. or Mrs. they adopted this. 

Almost universally on the sea-islands they call their equals also cousin. 
Their speech has but little inflection or power of expressing grammatical relation 
in any way. Even to-day they make little distinction of tense, gender, case, 
number, or person. " He " is most common as a possessive pronoun. Thus the 
teachers say that "him" might mean a girl as well as a boy. I quote the 
following specimens of negro talk from the volume published by the teachers 
mentioned above, as it gives, better than any one else has been able to show, 
the peculiarities of this remarkable dialect. 
" A scene at the opening of a school : 

" 'Charles, why did n't you come to school earlier?' 'A-could n't come soon 
to-day, sir; de boss he sheer out clo' dis mornin'.' 'What did he say to 
you?' 'Me, sir? I ain't git; de boss he de baddest buckra ebber a-see. 
De morest part ob de mens dey git heaps o' clo' — more 'n nuff; 'n I ain't 
git nuffin.' 'Were any other children there?' 'Plenty chil'n, sir. All de 
chil'n dah fo' sun-up.' 'January, you haven't brought your book.' 'It is, 
sir; sh'um here, sir?' 'Where is Jim?' 'I ain't know where he gone, sir.' 
'Where is Sam?' 'He didn't been here.' 'Where is the little boy, John?' 
'He pick up he foot and run.' A new scholar is brought: 'Good mornin', 
maussa; I bring dis same chile to school, sir; do don't let 'em stay arter 
school done. Here you, gal, stan' up an' say howdy to de genlm'n. De maussa 



SOUTHERN COOKERY. JQl 

lash 'em well ef he don't larn de lesson.' 'Where 's your book, Tom?' 
' Dunno, sir. Somebody mus' a tief 'em.' 'Where's your brother?' 'Sh'im 
dar ? wid bof he han' in he pocket ?' 'Billy, have you done your sum ?' ' Yes, 
sir, I out 'em.' 'Where 's Polly?' 'Polly de-de.' Taffy comes up. 'Please, 
sir, make me sensible of dat word — I want to ketch 'em werry bad, sir, werry 
bad.'" 

Probably, no Northern traveler ever went South without returning to com- 
plain with great bitterness of the poor food which he finds even in prosperous 
regions. Horace Greeley told the people of Texas that their prime need was a 
thousand good cooks ; and, doubtless, a few regiments of Frenchmen, well 
dispersed throughout the South, would succeed in giving the Southern people 
some much needed instruction in this respect. Yet criticism of the Southern 
cuisine cannot be general. Nowhere in the world is there better cookery or a 
richer bill of fare than that offered in Baltimore, in Charleston, in Savannah, and 
in New Orleans ; yet within a few miles of any of those cities one comes into a 
region where coarse bread, coarser pork, and a few stunted vegetables are the 
only articles of diet upon the farmers' tables. In regions where the best of 
mutton and beef can be raised at trivial expense, where with slight cultivation the 
land will produce a profusion of vegetables, and where good wines can be 
raised from vines of two or three years' growth, the farmers are a lean, 
ill-fed race. Nowhere was this more apparent to us than in the mountains, 
where, save at the hotels and in the comfortable mansions of well-to-do agricul- 
turists, we were usually invited to partake of hot and indigestible corn bread, fried 
and greasy ham, or bacon, as it is universally called in the South ; and whenever 
by rare chance a beefsteak found its way to the table, it had been remorselessly 
fried until not a particle of juice remained in its substance. 

People who subsist upon such food as this must of necessity use some stimu- 
lant, and they make up in corn whiskey and leaf tobacco what they lack in 
nourishing meats, good soups, and a general variety of vegetables. Wherever 
culture and refinement prevail, however, there one finds the best of cookery, 
an educated taste in wines, and a thorough appreciation of good things. 



LXXXIX. 

IMMIGRATION — THE NEED OF CAPITAL — DIVISION OF THE 
NEGRO VOTE — THE SOUTHERN LADIES. 

There is much that is discouraging in the present condition of the South, 
but no one is more loth than the Southerner to admit the impossibility 
of its thorough redemption. The growth of manufactures in the Southern States, 
while insignificant as compared with the gigantic development in the North and 
West, is still highly encouraging; and it is actually true that manufactured 
articles formerly sent South from the North are now made in the South to be 
shipped to Northern buyers. 

There is at least good reason to hope that in a few years immigration will 
pour into the fertile fields and noble valleys and along the grand streams of the 
South, assuring a mighty growth. The Southern people, however, will have to 
make more vigorous efforts in soliciting immigration than they have thus far 
shown themselves capable of, if they intend to compete with the robust assurance 
of Western agents in Europe. Texas and Virginia do not need to exert them- 
selves, for currents of immigrants are now flowing steadily to them; and, as has 
been seen in the North-west, one immigrant always brings, sooner or later, ten 
in his wake. But the cotton States need able and efficient agents in Europe 
to explain thoroughly the nature and extent of their resources, and to counteract 
the effect of the political misrepresentation which is so conspicuous during every 
heated campaign, and which never fails to do those States incalculable harm. 
The mischief which the grinding of the outrage mill by cheap politicians, in the 
vain hope that it might serve their petty ends, at the elections of 1874, did such 
noble commonwealths as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, can hardly be 
estimated. 

The Italians have been favorably looked upon by the Southerners as possible 
immigrants, and many planters in some of the States have offered them liberal 
inducements to settle on the lands which now lie wholly uncultivated ; but it will 
probably be some years before any considerable body of Italian settlers take up 
those lands. Many foreign immigrants show an indisposition to settle among 
the negroes, and an especial unwillingness to accept the wages offered them 
by the old school of planters — namely, a trivial sum yearly, and the rations 
of meal, pork, and molasses, with which the negro is easily contented. The 
immigration question can only be settled by time ; but an expose of the material 
resources of the South is an important aid to such settlement, and I have 
endeavored, in the foregoing pages, to give some adequate idea of those 
resources, and the possibility of their development. The attentive reader of this 



NEED OF CAPITAL — DIVISION OF THE NEGRO VOTE. 793 

book will not fail to discover that the mineral wealth ascertained since the 
war to exist in some of the States of the South is likely to be of far more 
importance to their future than all the broad cotton-fields, once their sole 
dependence. 

Until her people have recovered from the exhaustion consequent on the wr.r, 
capital is and will be the crying want of the South. The North will continue 
to furnish some portion of that capital, but will be largely checked in its invest- 
ments in that direction, as it has been heretofore, by its lack of confidence in the 
possibility of a solution of the political difficulties. 

If we may rely upon the figures given in the last census, the black race is 
increasing in numbers. Many travelers through the South, however, have 
expressed a contrary opinion, some enthusiastic correspondents asserting that 
the negroes, by flocking into the large cities, and there living in idleness and 
vice, are contracting the seeds of disease, which will eventually sweep the race 
away. But in spite of the fact that on many of the plantations foeticide, which 
in the days of slavery was of course almost unknown among the negroes, has 
become quite common, there seems no good reason to doubt that their numbers 
have increased nearly half a million within ten years. The black population will 
long be migratory, and will show the same tendency which has been so noticeable 
since the war to seek the attractive life of the town. 

Still, as white families are, as a rule, much larger in the South than in the 
North, and as the increase of the native Caucasian population there is, on the 
whole, greater than in any other section of the country, there is not much 
danger of the Africanization of any of the States of the South. The whites and 
blacks will have to learn to live and vote amicably together, and in time they 
will do so. 

As soon as the negro vote in the South is divided, and the black man learns 
to respect the merits of a candidate in spite of his political complexion, there 
will be but little of the trouble now-a-days so conspicuous in Louisiana, Alabama, 
and some of the other States. Within the last few months the South Carolina 
Conservatives have frankly allied themselves with those of the negroes who have 
shown a disposition to encourage honest government in the State, and this is a 
movement which will be general throughout the South as the abuses of recon- 
struction are corrected, and some of the more odious carpet-baggers, who have 
arrayed the negro wrongfully against the principal property-holders, are 
summarily dismissed from the arena pf politics. 

The South can never be cast in the same mould as the North. Its origin 
was too different; it will not be thoroughly emancipated from the influence of the 
old system for several generations. It will still cherish some prejudices against 
that utter freedom of speech, that devotion to " isms," and possibly that intense 
desire for immediate material development that distinguish the North ; but it 
will be progressive, more progressive and liberal every year. Its provincialisms 
will fade gradually away ; its educational facilities, despite the occasional 
hindrances imposed by such unwise manoeuvres as the projected passage of the 
Civil Rights bill, will increase and flourish. The negro will get justice from the 



794 THE SOUTHERN LADIES. 

lower classes of whites as soon as those classes are touched by the liberalizing 
influences of the times. There is, of course, still much objection to sitting with 
him on juries, or otherwise acknowledging his equality. 

It is not the province of this volume to indulge in theories as to the grave 
dangers which many politicians fancy still environ the Southern question, nor is 
it important to speculate upon the possible determination on the part of the 
planters to demand compensation some day for their emancipated slaves, or 
to hint that they may try to establish a labor system which shall relegate the 
negro to serfdom. Time alone can disclose the role which the Southern Con- 
servative will play when he returns to power. 

The Southern ladies during the trying years since the war have developed 
many noble qualities. It is hardly necessary to eulogize their beauty, their wit, 
their vivacity, or even to hint that they still cherish a few of the animosities 
which their husbands, brothers, and lovers have long ago laid aside. It is but 
natural that they should yet feel some of the bitterness of the war, for latterly 
its burdens have fallen quite as heavily upon them as upon the survivors of the 
Confederate ranks. They have toiled unceasingly and uncomplainingly. 

The frankness and earnestness with which these ladies accepted a changed 
order of things, the smile with which they have cheered the humble homes for 
which many of them have been compelled to leave noble mansions, and the 
charity and kindliness that they have shown toward their ex-slaves, entitle them 
to the highest honor. They have not been ashamed to teach negro schools 
now and then ; they have contentedly worn calico instead of satin when rude 
poverty made it necessary, and they have graced with the nameless charm of 
their manner circumstances which have made many men harsh and sour for 
life. It is but natural that, as they stray among the graves of the loved and lost, 
or amid the ruins of their homes and hopes, they should sometimes recall with 
strange affection the memory of a lost and mistaken cause, to which they gave 
themselves with a passionate devotion which has few parallels in the history of 
the world. 



xc 

RAMBLES IN VIRGINIA — FREDERICKSBURG — ALEXANDRIA. 
MOUNT VERNON — ARLINGTON. 

THE journey from Richmond to Washington, via the battle-scarred town of 
Fredericksburg, takes one through Henry, Hanover, Caroline, Spott- 
sylvania, Stafford, Prince William and Fairfax counties. This route is now a 
favorite one from Wilmington in North Carolina, and other large cities in the 
Southern Atlantic States, to the North, and sleeping-cars daily cross the Rappa- 
hannock, which a few years ago was red with the blood of Northern soldiers. 
In the vicinity of Ashland, the site of a flourishing Methodist college, fifteen 
miles from Richmond, there are thousands of uncultivated acres which might 
readily be turned into profitable farms. The birthplace of Henry Clay is not 
far from Ashland. Fredericksburg is a venerable town, pleasantly situated on 
the south shore of the Rappahannock, seventy miles from Washington. The 
"Falls," a mile above the place, afford an extensive water power. Falmouth, 
on the north side of the river a little above Fredericksburg, is a small village of 
the ordinary Virginian type. 

Fredericksburg is, historically, one of the most interesting places in Virginia. 
The birthplace of George Washington is near the town, half a mile from the 
junction of Pope's creek with the Potomac, in Westmoreland county, on the 
"Wakefield" estate. The old farm-house, a rude building with enormous stone 
chimneys at each end, in which Washington was born, was destroyed some time 
before the Revolution. The only memorial on the spot to-day is a freestone 
slab, erected by George Washington Park Custis in 1815, and bearing these 

words : 

"Here, the nth of February (O. S.), 
1732, George Washington 
was born." 

Near Fredericksburg, too, repose the remains of the mother of Washington, who 
lived for many years in the town. Some time before her death, she selected the 
spot, and often retired to it for meditation and prayer. In 1833 the corner- 
stone of a fine monument was laid above the grave by Andrew Jackson, then 
President of the United States ; but the monument is still unfinished. The 
house in which the last memorable interview between the mother and her distin- 
guished son occurred still stands in Fredericksburg. The old Masonic Hall, in 
which Washington was initiated into the Masonic Order, is also yet standing. 

But the reverence which the mass of Americans a generation since felt for 
these important memorials has been dulled by the newer and sadder souve- 
nirs which fill the minds of all visitors to the Fredericksburg of to-day. The 
Si 



796 MARYE'S HILL THE WILDERNESS. 

heights on either side of the little river have been the scene of one of the great- 
est battles in our history ; the old town has echoed to the noise of fratricidal 
strife, has been riddled by shot and shell, and some portions of it have been 
burned. It is wonderful that it was not entirely torn to pieces by Burnside's 
guns in 1862. Many a European village, far more solidly built, was crushed 
into ruins under the shock of battle between the contending hosts in the last 
struggle in France, while Fredericksburg yet shows a smiling front. The old 
steeples, around which raged tempests of bombs and bullets, still point serenely 
heavenward ; and the rows of houses by the river, past which went the torrent 
which poured up Marye's Hill to attack the Confederate position, seem but 
little damaged. The stranger can readily convince himself, however, that the 
tide of battle has swept over Fredericksburg, if he will but climb the hills 
which lie beyond the plain at the rear of the town — those eminences along 
which Lee posted his army of defense, from Hamilton's Crossing to Marye's 
Hill. There he will find, charmingly laid out in terraces like some vast garden, 
a huge national cemetery, where many thousand soldiers sleep the sleep that 
knows no waking upon earth. 

At the foot of Marye's Hill may still be seen the stone wall behind which 
the Confederate infantry were posted on that dread day in 1862 when the 
Northern troops, time and time again repulsed, were finally compelled, by the 
artillery fire from the hill, to retire across the Rappahannock. That stone wall is 
a monument to the bravery of the Irish troops who there fought for the Union. 
If mortal men could have taken it, it would have been theirs ; but it was an 
impregnable position. Blackened with smoke, and scarred with bullets, it is a 
ghastly reminder of the days when Northern Virginia was a battle-ground where 
two giant antagonists had declared war against each other to the death. Lee's 
Hill, where General Lee stood during the fight in December of 1862, and 
Chatham, on the north side of the river, where General Burnside had his head- 
quarters, are interesting points, both offering a good view of the surrounding 
country. 

A journey into the battle-grounds of the " Wilderness" — that vast tract 
stretching southward from the Rapidan, and westward from Mine Run, may 
be readily made on horseback or in private conveyance from Fredericksburg. 
The Wilderness, which has been described as a "darkling wood" covered with 
" a dense undergrowth of low-limbed and scraggy pines, stiff and bristling 
chincapins, scrub oaks, and hazel," is not looked upon with much affection by 
Virginians, as the lands in that section are not valuable. On the road to 
Chancellorsville one passes Salem Church ; and not far from that point is the 
"Mountain Way" estate, where General Sedgwick had his head-quarters when 
he was fighting his way to Chancellorsville in 1863. The view of Fredericks- 
burg, the Rappahannock, and the distant summits of the Blue Ridge from this 
place, is delightful. In the vicinity of Chancellorsville one may still see the 
outlines of the Federal works, the tree under which Stonewall Jackson lay for 
a time after he received his fatal wound, the old Wilderness Tavern, and the 
Wilderness Church. 



• LACK OF THRIFT. 797 

Hanover, Caroline, and Spottsylvania counties produce excellent crops of 
tobacco, winter wheat, rye and Indian corn ; the farmers are intelligent and 
capable, and saw enough of Northern men during the war to wear away a good 
deal of their old-time prejudice against the "Yankees." There are still large 
tracts of unimproved land in these counties ; industrious and frugal immigrants 
can readily turn them into paying farms. 

The old town of Alexandria, seated on the Potomac shore, seven miles from 
Washington, is now accessible by rail from Richmond. Before the completion 
of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac railroad, trains from the Vir- 
ginian capital stopped at Acquia creek, on the river, whence passengers were 
conveyed in boats to Alexandria and Washington. The Orange, Alexandria, 
and Manassas railroad procures for Alexandria trade with many of the counties 
along the line, and, by the "Washington and Ohio," lays hold upon fertile 
Halifax and Loudon counties. The town has a cotton-mill, a brewery, some 
private iron workers and machinists, a few repair shops for railroad works, and 
it makes extensive transfers of coal. It occupies a position admirably fitted for 
large industrial activity. Its frontage on the Potomac is better than that of any 
other town on the river, and yet it languishes. Its inhabitants seem to lack the 
vigor and the enterprise needed to seize upon and improve their fine advantages. 
They are in the attitude of waiting for something to turn up, yet do not even 
display the impracticable enthusiasm of Micawber when an opportunity presents 
itself. The streets were not paved until a Northern officer, during the occupa- 
tion in war times, insisted upon having a pavement of cobble stones laid down, 
and met the expense by fines levied upon whiskey- selling. Few repairs have 
been made, and the avenues are filled with ruts and hollows. The inhabitants 
seem to feel, with regard to the changed order of things upon which they have 
fallen, very much as did the old negro whom I met there in 1869. 

"Tears like, boss," said the venerable darkey, as he looked up the river toward 
the dome of the National Capitol, the Mecca of his dreams, and then glanced 
over his broken down chest and withered limbs, "'pears like I 's come too late 
for de good times." 

One sees nerveless unthrift in many small Virginian towns. It seems graven 
in the nature of whites and blacks. An occasional conversation with the negroes 
led me to believe that they offer as many hindrances to the advent of capital as 
their ex-masters do. Both seem suspicious that some improper and undue 
advantage is to be taken of them. The negro appears oftentimes suspicious of 
those who are making strenuous endeavors to elevate him out of his shiftless and 
helpless condition into something like manly independence. 

Alexandria was once a part of the District of Columbia, but was retroceded 
to Virginia in 1846, when the Old Dominion regained all the territory, which 
had before been national ground. The town was founded in 1748; Washington 
was a frequent visitor there, and the pew in which he used to sit, in Christ 
Church, is still pointed out. The hourly steamboat line which plies between 
Washington and Alexandria affords communication with the Washington City 
and Potomac line of steamers, with Norfolk, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. 



798 MOUNT VERNON. 

A new commercial exchange, and a fine Government custom-house and post- 
office have recently been erected in the town. 

In summer and autumn the journey down the Potomac from Washington is 
usually interesting. There is a certain picturesqueness in the great stream and 
the quaint towns and fortifications along its banks ; Forts Foote and Washington, 
on the Maryland side, being especially noticeable. On the little steamer which 
plies regularly to and from Mount Vernon, the old home of the Father of his 
Country, may sometimes be found a few Virginians clad in rusty black, who 
confidentially discuss with the stranger the painful issues of the present. 

Mount Vernon is fifteen miles from the Capitol, and the traveler will not fail 
to observe, while sailing down the river, that the fields on the Virginia side have 
not yet recovered from the devastation of war. The whole country has the 
trampled aspect which the passage of the myriads of men and horses, and the 
location of the thousand camps, naturally gave it. Fort Washington, on the 
Maryland side, was blown up in 18 14 when the British occupied Washington, 
but is now thoroughly restored. On a fertile slope on the Virginia shore, in the 
midst of noble groves and on a pretty lawn, overlooking the wide and winding 
river, one may see here and there a few substantial mansions, once the homes of 
prosperous planters. The woods near Mount Vernon, like many bits of forest 
along the Potomac, are untamed, but a pretty road leads up the hill-side to 
the tomb, and thence wanders to the lawn, where stands the Washington mansion 
with its little cupola, its quaint roof and its veranda with eight stately pillars. 

Nothing can be simpler than the tomb in which the first President of the 
United States reposes. It is of quadrangular form, built on a sloping hill-side, 
painted red and white, a high iron gate guarding the entrance. Above the gate 
is the inscription, " Within this enclosure rest the remains of General George 
Washington." There is no attempt at decoration. One sees nothing but two 
marble coffins lying on the brick floor ; the one on the right has upon its, lid a 
spread eagle, a flag and a shield, and beneath these emblems the single word, 
"Washington." The coffin on the left is plain, and contains the remains of 
Mrs. Washington. Above the door which opens into another vault are the 
following words : 

"I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were 
dead, yet shall he live." 

Near the tomb are several other family monuments, much more showy and 
pretentious than that which covers the mortal remains of our chief patriot. The 
old tomb, in which the body of Washington remained for thirty years, was situated 
between the present vault and the house. 

The mansion commands a fine view of the river, and, were it not for its low 
ceilings and its lack of all the comforts of modern residences, would be a desirable 
country residence for a century to come ; for, although it is now more than one 
hundred and twenty-five years old, it is still solid and enduring. The wood of 
which the house is built is cut in blocks in imitation of stone ; on the sloping 
sides of the roof there are dormer windows, and the portico, which covers the 
whole front of the building, is quite imposing. 



ACQUIA CREEK POHICK. 799 

The gardens and the lawn in the rear of the house, with the walks ex- 
tending to what were formerly the negro quarters, are extensive and pleasant, 
and one or two colored families supply the visitor with luncheon, and nosegays 
from the garden. Mrs. Cunningham, the present guardian of that portion 
of the estate purchased by the patriotic ladies of the country some years 
ago and preserved as a National treasure, lives at Mount Vernon some portion 
of the year. The farms round about are owned by Northern men, and 
the old lordly life of the planter and country gentleman, which prevailed so 
extensively in all that region when Washington inhabited Mount Vernon, 
has passed utterly away. The whole surroundings of the estate are calculated 
to remind one of the English country seats which still remain, in some parts 
of England, much as they were two centuries ago. The quaint staircases, 
and odd little angular passages in the mansion, are thronged by fashionable 
tourists from the cities, who never fail to express their wonder that the 
Father of his Country lived in such a simple, unostentatious style. 

Below Mount Vernon on the Virginia side one comes upon naked sand- 
bluffs standing out into the stream here and there ; on shad and herring 
fishing stations, where in spring time, when the herring shoals come in, 
hundreds of fishermen are busy; and upon forests, where in autumn the 
hickories and cedars, the oaks and the ashes, the chestnuts and the beeches 
clothe the hill-sides in brilliant colors. At Acquia Creek, a dreary and forlorn 
little place to-day, but an important military depot during the war, one may 
take the railroad for Fredericksburg. In the vicinity of Acquia Creek there 
were many Confederate batteries, which of course did their best to injure the 
Federal shipping on the Potomac in the early years of the war. 

A journey by land from Mount Vernon to either Alexandria or Fred- 
ericksburg may be made along the main road, which extends through a wild 
country, and which those who have traversed it declare to be not only the 
worst road in any country, but probably much worse now than it was when 
Washington was wont to ride over it. 

On the road from Mount Vernon to Fredericksburg one passes Pohick, 
where stands a ruined church, which the family of Washington attended until 
the close of the Revolution ; and crosses a pretty river, called Occoquan, which 
empties into the Potomac near the headland known as High Point, upon which, 
during the fall after the battle of Bull Run, the Confederates established their 
nearest river battery to Washington. 

Southward, on the Washington City, Virginia Midland and Great Southern 
railroad, is Clifton Station, twelve miles from the old Bull Run battle-field. 
This was a famous depot during the war for army supplies, and is now a 
prosperous summer resort, frequented by visitors from Northern cities. In 
Prince William county, on the same line of rail, is the flourishing village of 
Manassas. It is situated on the summit of a high table-land, twenty-seven 
miles from Alexandria, and commands a beautiful view of the surrounding 
country. Six miles to the right of it, in the direction of Fairfax, the first 
battle of Manassas was fought, and here and there a ruined earthwork marks 






8oo 



POINTS OF INTEREST BATTLE SITES. 



the site of the old struggle. In 1 868 there was not a fence or a building on 
the spot where the town now stands, but since that time many Northern and 
Western people have flocked into it. The centre of a prosperous county with 
ample facilities for transportation, with a fine free school system, and with the 
best of hematite iron ore in its vicinity, it can but have a prosperous future. 
Throughout this entire section the tide of battle raged during 1862 and 1863. 
Hooker and Ewell, Warren and Hill, marched and countermarched over the 
devastated country, which to-day is rapidly recovering from the shock of war. 

In Fauquier county are situated the Warrenton White Sulphur Springs, 
where formerly a brilliant society annually gathered. Warrenton, fifty miles 
from Alexandria, now receives many fashionable visitors yearly. Nine miles 
from trie town is the birthplace of Chief-Justice Marshall. In Culpepper county 
stands the town of Culpepper, founded in 1759, and first named after Lord 




The Potomac and Washington — Seen from Arlington, Virginia. 

Fairfax, the original proprietor of the section. The little town looks down 
upon the beautiful and vast extent of the Blue Ridge, has a handsome and 
costly court-house, and many prosperous manufactories, and is also the site 
of the annual fair of the Piedmont Agricultural Society, of which General 
Kemper, the present Governor of Virginia, was, for two years, the chief 
executive officer. Near Mitchell's Station the battle known as that of Cedar 
Mountain was fought in August, 1862. Magnetic iron ores and fine grass- 
lands are gradually attracting Northern immigration to the surroundings of 
the old battle-field. From Culpepper the Washington City, Virginia Midland 
and Great Southern railroad runs through Gordonsville, Charlottesville and 
Lynchburg to Danville, four miles from the North Carolina line in Pittsylvania 
county, whence it connects with the Piedmont air line via Charlotte in North 
Carolina, to Atlanta in Georgia. 



STRASBURG OFFICERS' HILL. 801 

The railroad known as the Manassas Division, and running through the town 
of Manassas, through Warren, Shenandoah, and other counties in Northern 
Virginia, passes Front Royal, near which is the finest and most profitable vine- 
yard in the whole South. The Northern visitor, while at Front Royal, has his 
attention directed to the exploits of General Stonewall Jackson, who, in 1862, 
in a severe battle near this town, drove General Banks out of the Shenandoah 
valley. At Rivington Station, the junction of the North and South forks of the 
Shenandoah river, much of the brown hematite and magnetic iron ore which 
comes down the river in flat-boats from the counties of Rockingham, Page and 
Warren, is received and exported. A joint-stock company of Northern capital- 
ists, with a million dollars of capital stock, is now operating in this region. 

The traveler along the romantic gaps of the Shenandoah passes th^ sites 
of the battles of Chester Gap, Cedar Creek and Front Royal, and, straying 
by the ruins of burned bridges and devastated farms, cannot but wonder that 
the Virginians of the section have so soon recovered their courage and shown a 
disposition to rebuild after the prostrating struggle. Five miles from Stras- 
burg, the present western terminus of the " Manassas Division," Ashby's 
Confederate cavalry and Banks's infantry fought a sharp battle in May of 1 862, 
and a little north of this, at Cedarville, that dashing and gallant West Virginian, 
McCausland, met, in a severe fight, part of General Phil Sheridan's forces. 
Shenandoah county, originally called Dunmore, after the Tory Lord of that 
name, but later more properly named after the beautiful and picturesque 
Shenandoah river, which wanders by cliff and through meadow within its limits, 
is extremely fertile. Strasburg was so named because its original settlers came 
from Germany. It will in due time be a place of great importance, and the 
Capon and Orkney Springs near it will give it a good tide of summer travel. 
One mile south of the town is Officers' Hill, where Early and Sheridan met in 
a tremendous fight in September of 1864, and in October of the same ^ year 
severe battles were fought in the immediate vicinity. This region is one of the 
most beautiful in Virginia. The rugged and mighty slopes of the Massanuttan 
contain much delightful and wild scenery, and near Newmarket Station there is 
a beautiful cataract. 

Along these lines of rail many fine bodies of land are offered to capitalists 
and actual settlers. Many of the lands are admirably adapted to the production 
of the grape ; and the fine air, the beautiful springs of fresh water, the short 
and mild winters, the long and equable summers, offer superior attractions to 
the emigrant from England or from middle Europe. 

The traveler along the Potomac will do well to scale the hill opposite George- 
town, in the District of Columbia, on which stands Arlington House. The 
famous mansion, once the residence of George Washington Parke Custis, one of 
the last survivors of the Washington family, stands more than two hundred feet 
above the Potomac ; and from its massive portico one can look out over Wash- 
ington, and can see the white dome of the National Capitol gleaming through 
dark green foliage. Arlington was, for many years before the late war, a part of 
the estate of General Robert E. Lee, but when that valiant soldier unsheathed his 



802 THE CEMETERIES AT ARLINGTON. 

sword in the Confederate cause, the grand old mansion and the beautiful grounds 
about it were confiscated to Government use, and are now held on an arrear of 
taxes title. The ravages of war have destroyed many of the beauties of the 
parks and gardens. To-day, the fields of Arlington, which the proud leader of 
the Confederate hosts cherished as one of his favorite resorts, are covered with 
national cemeteries. Fifteen thousand graves, on the head-boards over many 
of which is written the word "Unknown," dot the slopes and lawns. Near the 
mansion is a short but heavy granite monument, on which is the following 

inscription : 

" Beneath this stone 

repose the bones of two thousand one hundred and eleven 

unknown soldiers, gathered after the war, from 

the fields of Bull Run and the route to the Rappahannock. 

Their remains could not be identified, but their names and deaths 

are recorded in the archives of the 

country, and its grateful citizens honor them 

as of their noble army of martyrs. 

May they rest in peace. 

Sept. A. D. 1866." 

Thousands of negro soldiers and "contrabands" who died during the war, are 
also buried at Arlington. In the eastern division of the largest of the three 
cemeteries are monuments to the memory of George Washington Parke Custis 
and Mary his wife. Thousands of visitors yearly come and go, over the hills, 
under the oaks, and among the graves at Arlington; and now and then old 
soldiers, who for long years fought fiercely against each other in opposing ranks, 
pause in friendly converse by some grassy mound, beneath which sleeps an 
unknown and forgotten member of the great army that has passed into the 
silence and shadows beyond. 



y. 




APPENDIX 



FACTS AND FIGURES CONCERNING THE EX-SLAVE STATES, 
AND DELAWARE AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. 



POPULATION. 
Compiled from the United. States Census of 1870. 



Alabama . 
Arkansas 
Delaware 



Florida 



Georgia. 



Louisiana 

Maryland 

Mississippi 

Missouri 

North Carolina. 
South Carolina. 
Tennessee 



Texas 



STATES. 



Kentucky '.'.".' '..' '.'. . . 1,098,692 



WHITES. 



521,384. 
362,115. 
102,221 . 
96,057. 
638,926. 



. 362,065 . 

• 605,497. 
. 382,896. 
1,603,146. 

• 678,470. 
.289,667. 
.936,119. 



564,700. 



Virginia '.' 712, 



West Virginia 

District of Columbia. 
Totals. 



424,033 
88,288. 



BLACKS. 



•9»466,355 



•475)5oi 
. 122,169 

• 22,794 
. 91,689 
.545,142 
.222,210 
.364,210 

•175,391 
.444,201 
.118,071 
.391,650 
.415,814 
•322,331 

•253,475 
.512,841 

• i7,9 8 o 
43,404 



4,538,782 



APPENDIX. 



MANUFACTURES OF COTTON IN THE UNITED STATES. 
NEW ENGLAND STATES. 



New York 

Pennsylvania 

New Jersey 

Delaware 

Maryland 

District of Columbia. 

Total 



STATES. 


i860. 

RAW MATERIAL USED. 


1870. 
RAW MATERIAL USED. 




POUNDS. 


VALUE. 


POUNDS. 


VALUE. 


Maine . . '. 


23,733,165 
51,002,324 
1,447,250 
134,012,759 
41,614,797 
31,891,011 


$3,319,335 

7,128,196 

181,030 

17,214,592 

5,799,223 
4,028,406 


25,887,771 

41,469,719 

1,235,652 

130,654,040 

44,630,787 

3 T , 747, 309 


$6,746,780 

12,318,867 

292,269 

37,371,599 

13,268,315 

8,818,651 


New Hampshire 


Vermont 

Massachusetts 

Rhode Island 

Connecticut 


Total 


283,701,306 


$37,670,782 


275,625,278 


$78,816,482 





MIDDLE STATES. 



23,945,627 

37,496,203 

9,094,649 

3,403,000 

12,880,119 

294,117 



$3,061,105 
7,386,213 

1,165,435 

570,102 

1,698,413 

47,403 



,113,715 $13,928,671 



24,783,351 

32,953,318 

7,920,035 

2,587,615 

12,693,647 



80,937,966 



$6,990,626 

10,724,052 

1,964,758 

704,733 
3,409,426 



$23,793,595 



WESTERN STATES. 



Ohio .... 
Indiana . 
Illinois. . 
Iowa .... 

Utah 

Missouri . 
Kentucky 



Totr.l 



3,192,500 

1,813,944 

95,000 



12,000 

990,000 

1,826,000 



7,929,444 



$374,100 

229,925 

n,93° 

6,600 
1 10,000 
214,755 



$946,7io 



2,226,400 

2,070,318 

857,000 

20,000 

23,500 

2,196,600 

1,584,625 



8,908,443 



SOUTHERN STATES. 



$493,74o 
542,875 

177,525 
4,95° 
7,o5r 

481,745 

375,o48 



$2,082,934 



Virginia 

North Carolina 
South Carolina 

Georgia 

Florida 

Alabama 

Louisiana 

Texas 

Mississippi 

Arkansas 

Tennessee 



Total 

Total United States 



7,544,297 
5,540,738 
3,978,061 

13,907,904 

200,000 

5,246,800 

1,995,700 

588,000 

638,800 

187,500 

4,072,710 



43,960,510 



422,704,975 



$811,187 
622,363 
431,525 

1,466,375 
23,000 

617,633 

226,000 

64,140 

79,800 

11,600 

384,548 



,739,371 



$57,285,534 



4,255,383 

4,238,276 

4,756,823 

10,921,176 

3,249,523 

748,525 

1,079,118 

580,764 

66,400 

2,872,582 



32,768,570 



$937,820 
963,809 
761.469 

2,504,758 

764,965 
161,485 
216,519 
123,568 
i3,78o 
595,789 



398,248,257 



$7,042,962 



$in,735,973 



APPENDIX. 



STATISTICS "OFI THE" MANUFACTURES OF COTTON IN THE 

UNITED STATES. 



NEW ENGLAND STATES. 



STATES. 


1850. 


i860. 


1870. 




Value of Product. 


Value of Product. 


Value of Product. 


Maine 


$2,630,616 

8,861,749 

280,300 

21,394,401 

6,495,972 
4,122,952 


$6,235,623 

13,699,994 

357,450 

38,004,255 

12,151,191 

8,911,387 


$11,844,181 

16,999,672 

546,510 

59,493,153 
22,049,203 
14,026,334 


New Hampshire 


Vermont 


Massachusetts 


Rhode Island 


Connecticut 




Total 


$43,785,990 


$79,359,9°° 


$124,759,053 





MIDDLE STATES. 



New York. . 

Pennsylvania 

New Jersey 

Delaware 

Maryland 

District of Columbia. 

Total 



$5,019,323 
5,812,126 
1,289,648 

538,439 

2,021,396 

100,000 



$14,780,932 



$6,676,878 

13,650,114 

2,217,728 

94 T > 703 

2,973,877 

74,400 



$26,534,700 



$11,178,211 

17,490,080 

4,015,768 

1,060,898 

4,832,808 



$38,587,765 



WESTERN STATES. 



Ohio 

Indiana. . . 
Illinois. . . 

Iowa 

Utah 

Missouri . . 
Kentucky , 

Total. 



$594,204 
86,660 



142,900 
445,639 



$1,269,403 



$723,500 

344,35o 

18,987 

10,000 
230,000 
315,270 



$1,642,107 



P68i,335 

778,047 
279,000 
7,000 
16,803 
798,850 
251,550 



$2,792,585 



SOUTHERN STATES. 



Virginia 

North Carolina 
South Carolina 

Georgia 

Florida 

Alabama 

Louisiana 

Texas 

Mississippi .... 

Arkansas 

Tennessee .... 



Total 

Total United States 



$1,446,109 
985,411 
842,440 

1,395,056 
49,920 

398,585 



22,000 

17,360 

508,481 



$5,665,362 



$65,501,687 



51,489,971 

1,046,047 

713,050 

2,371,207 

40,000 

1,040,147 

466,500 

80,695 

176,328 

23,000 

698,122 



5,145,067 



,115,681,774 



$1,435,800 
1,345,052 
1,529,930 
3,648,973 

1,088,767 
251,550 
374,598 
234,445 
22,362 
941,542 



$10,873,019 



$177,022,422 



IV 



APPENDIX, 



COTTON TRADE OF THE UNITED STATES FOR FORTY-EIGHT YEARS. 



PRODUCTION. 



1865-66 
1866-67 
I867-68 
1868-69 
I869-7O 

I87O-7I 
187I-72 
I872-73 



720,027 
975*231 
720,593 
870,415 
976,845 

1,038,847 

9 8 7*477 
1,070,438 
1,205,394 
1,254,328 

1,360,725 
1,423,930 
1,801,497 
1*360,532 
2,177*835 

i* 6 34*954 
1*683,574 
2,378,875 
2,030,409 
2,394,503 

3,100,537 
1,778,651 
2,439,786 
2,866,938 
2,233,718 

2,454,442 
3,126,310 
3,416,214 

3*074,979 
2,982,634 

3*665,557 
3*093,737 

3,257,339 
4,018,914 
4,861,292 

3,849,469 



2,269,316 
2,097,254 

2,519*554 
2,366,467 
3*122,551 

4,362,317 
3*oi4,35i 
3,930,508 



CONSUMPTION. 



149,516 
120,593 
118,853 
126,512 

182,142 
173,800 
194,412 
196,413 
216,888 

236,733 
222,540 
246,063 
276,Ol8 
295,193 

267,850 
267,850 
325,129 
346,750 
389,000 

422,600 
428,000 
616,044 
642,485 
613,498 

485,614 
689,603 
803,725 
737*236 
706,417 

770,739 
819,936 
595,562 
927,651 
978,043 

843*740 



666,IOO 
770,030 
906,636 

926,374 
• 865,160 

I,IIO,I96 

1,237,330 
1,201,127 



854,000 
600,000 
740,000 
839,000 

773,000 

892,000 

867,000 

1,028,000 

1,023,500 

1,116,000 
1,169,000 
1,575,000 
1,074,000 
1,876,000 

i,3I3,5oo 
1,465,500 
2,0.10,000 
1,629,500 
2,083,700 

1,666,700 
1,241,200 
1,858,000 
2,228,000 
1,590,200 

1,988,710 
2,443*646 
2,528,400 
2,319,148 
2,244,209 

2,954,606 
2,252,657 

2,59o,455 
3,021,403 

3,774,173 
3*127,568 



1,554,664 

i,557*o54 
1,655,816 
1,465,880 
2,206,480 

3,166,742 

i*957,3H 
2,679,986 



AVERAGE 

NET 

WEIGHT 

PER BALE. 



AVERAGE 

PRICE 

PER LB. IN 

NEW YORK. 



33I 

335 

34i 
339 

34i 
360 

350 

363 

367 

373 
379 
379 
384 
383 

394 
397 
409 
412 

4i5 

411 
43i 
417 
436 
429 

416 
428 
428 
430 
434 

420 
444 
442 
447 
461 

477 



441 
444 
445 
444 
44o 

442 
443 
464 



9 

7 
7 
7 
5 

\ 7 

11 

8 

7 
12 

12 

3i -9" 
11 
10 
10 

10 

13 
12 
12 
11 

13 

3i 

67 

101 

83 

43 
3i 
24 
29 

23 

16 
20 
18 



19 
29 

32 
88 

04 

7i 
38 
32 
90 

45 

50 

25 
14 

36 

92 

50 
85 
25 
73 
63 

87 
21 

03 

55 
34 

H 
-50 
02 
97 
39 

30 
5i 
23 
08 
00 

01 
29 
21 
5o 
38 

20 
59 
85 
01 



95 



J5 



AVERAGE 

PRICE 
PER LB. 

IN LIVER- 
POOL. 



18 

22 
27 
19 

15 
IO 
lO 
12 

9 

8 

10 
9 



85 
79 
84 
32 
44 

72 

T, 
87 

IO 

13 

97 
09 
28 

19 
42 

73 
86 

37 
7i 
92 

80 
03 
93 
09 
10 

51 
05 

54 
3i 

60 



73 

91 

68 

97 

50 

37 
46 

17 
11 

30 
98 

5^ 
12 



LB JL '07 



Cf'p 



